


All the world is bullet shaped

by pushdragon



Series: All the world is bullet shaped [1]
Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Eames's criminal family, France (Country), Hanoi, Kenya, Kisumu, M/M, Marseille, dubious bargain, somnacin backstory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-17
Updated: 2013-07-22
Packaged: 2017-12-12 03:45:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 76,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/806834
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pushdragon/pseuds/pushdragon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If Arthur thinks that, just by waving enough money around, he can get Eames to risk his life and reputation to rescue him from a death sentence, he's got another thing coming. So Eames sets a malicious, undignified price on his services, one he can be certain that a man like Arthur would never condescend to pay. It turns out to be the first of many mistakes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Artisan Thief

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Polski available: [Świat opisany pociskiem](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1290724) by [Donnie_Engelvin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Donnie_Engelvin/pseuds/Donnie_Engelvin)



_2 weeks' work,_ the first innocuous message reads. _Prompt start. Well worth your while. How are you placed?_

Though the sender address is new, he knows it's Arthur because no-one else has the bloody-mindedness to muck about with pointless apostrophes whilst skimping on greetings, sign-offs and any other inefficient concessions to courtesy. A man who, barely two months ago, was fighting alongside Eames for his very sanity on that utter balls-up of Cobb's inception job, could at least lower himself to start with 'hi'. 

In any case, virtually everyone else who might offer him work knows exactly where he is, who he is with, and how much longer his current job is going to take, because Eames works with family.

The stitches in the five-day-old gash in his ribs are itching like biting ants in the Hanoi sweat, he's far enough past exhaustion that his peripheral vision's in a permanent blur, and that persistent fucking kid who's been tailing him from the currency exchange is still lurking outside the cafe, as if fascinated by the stand of Dior knock-off ladies' scarves. 

_Not available,_ he starts to type, since he's got far bigger things on his mind than putting Arthur in his place, such as dodging the extraterritorial grasp of some very angry Red Army generals long enough to avoid finishing his days floating off Fisherman's Wharf back in Macau.

There's a crash outside and the sort of carefully abrupt speech that's as close as you get to shouting in this place. At the sweet sound of opportunity, Eames has logged off in the blink of an eye. He's in luck. A taxi has clipped a table stacked with woks and bamboo steamers, sending the whole lot toppling into the gaps in the narrow laneway that aren't already blocked by parked bikes and the slanted body of the car. The girl meets Eames's eyes for an instant, like she's just realised what's going down, and a moment after that Eames is on his way, leaving her to dodge past the taxi and the angry shop owner.

He picks up another tail in the post office – even more tenacious, the vigilant kind whose employer does not take kindly to failure. Eames has to take a taxi out to the suburbs to lose him, and spend ninety minutes winding home through rain-soaked back streets to keep him lost. 

**

It's not time to ditch their haul in a river and run, not just yet. 

Some of the police here keep up the charming communist tradition of surveilling tourists with undue vigour, that's all. It was worse in the nineties, from the way his brother tells the story of the low-level property investment con he ran out of Nha Trang, and Charlie's always been the sort to save his lies for strangers. 

All they have to do is hold their nerve. Frank hasn't seen the inside of a court room in thirty years, and Miriam's not about to let some hitch in the job get in the way of painting her new studio in Berlin in time for summer. Still, if this were an outside job, he'd be turning his mind to cutting himself loose about now, in case their string of shitty luck gets any worse.

"Had enough, Jimmy?" Miriam says in the low light of a corner table in the closest thing they can find to a tourist bar in their out-of-the-way corner of the city. 

Although they're technically cousins, a legacy of living in each other's pockets throughout their fathers' lifelong criminal partnership is her very sisterly habit of winding him up.

"You look a bit rough," she adds with concern. 

She says it as if he'd overdone it slightly on buckets of bastardised cheap margaritas, rather than coming straight off five desperate days on the open seas, splitting from Macau in a stolen fishing boat, down to their second and final back-up plan, going like all the armies of hell were on their tail and patching their wounds as they fled, repainting the roof by night to throw off aerial surveillance, lying low off Hainan for two nail-biting days and missing with every distant pass of chopper wings the improvised fluky genius that Eames's dad had brought to every job of his life except his last one, before they had finally crawled into Hai Phong in the bustle of this morning's traffic with nothing but their stolen cargo, some leftover Chinese handguns, and a taped up duty free bag full of US dollars. 

"This?" Eames swipes his open hand over the shabby bristle over his jaw, thinking how he's only a couple of hours away from his first contact with a proper pillow in nearly a week. "You're the one who nicked us a boat without a decent day spa."

A couple of hours at the hotel have done her the world of good. Sipping her glass of Tiger, she looks, with her short coral-coloured fingernails and bracelet of blue and white factory-made beads, like any of the other patrons, like a government lawyer on an overseas break, perhaps a travel writer researching her new book. 

"Good to see one of us has had time to take it easy."

Without rising to that, she leans in. "I found two tour groups leaving on Saturday. You'll be on the same flight. That gives us four days to do you up a couple of matching pieces to cover the dragon vase."

"As long as that?" he says with a level of disinterest he doesn't quite feel, and looks at his watch. "Anything else you'd like me to whip you up in the meantime? I'd say that eggshell mosaic finish needs a pretty steady hand."

By the time Frank gets back from Hai Phong, waving off the taxi driver like an old friend, it's late. The bar has got noisy and full, and Miriam and a bald chef from Wellington are finishing Eames off at the pool table. 

"All packed and loaded," Frank tells him in an undertone. "Cargo ship leaving tomorrow. Gets into Marseille in four weeks."

Frank can do nonchalance pitch perfect, even with the muzzle of a gun in the back of his neck, but there's something a fraction off tonight. It's a valuable cache of weapons they've just put on the open sea, and all they've kept back is the elderly pistol in Frank's jacket pocket.

"How much did it cost?"

Frank takes a long drink from his can and flashes him a tight, bitter grin. "A little extra."

Eames nods, idly considering the angles on the pool table and noting the careful flex of biceps the chef is putting on for Miriam's benefit as he lines up his shot. If Eames is the chameleon of the family, Miriam's disguise is a careful genericism, styling herself like a mid-range model with the serial number and all other marks of provenance drilled off. Her accent, like his own, has been all but erased by travel and artifice, but when she turns up the French, a certain kind of bloke gets curious.

"Hang about." The chef halts his shot and looks up at Frank's interruption. "Yellow off the board here. There's no way you'll get to the red without making a mess of the cue ball."

The chef acknowledges the unsolicited advice with a friendly nod, and the angle of approach shifts. Even three decades on the continent haven't diluted Frank's old geezer magic. He has an uncanny ability to sound like everyone's uncle or neighbour or trusted publican. 

The chef promptly misses the yellow, then has to lean on the back of Miriam's chair to watch Eames clean up the frame. 

"Good game," Eames tells him. "Again?" 

Then he kicks back to spend the rest of the evening goading Miriam's new friend into a few fairly painful losing bets, because no-one deserves to get laid on a job that's still just one unlucky stroke away from ending all of their careers. 

**

"Who the fuck is Arthur?" Alex demands the next morning, his scowl apparent the moment he shows up in the skype window. "Tell him I'm not your receptionist, and if he wants me to return his calls he'd better stop making them at one o'clock in the morning."

Though Alex has kept the Engelvin surname, he's certainly not using it openly as he works his way into the good graces of the diplomatic corps in Geneva to ferret out information for blackmail, theft or a good cover story. He can't have been easy to find. 

"I'm on it," Eames assures him. "Although the bad news is that quite a lot goes on after ten pm when you're getting your beauty sleep. Listen, are we on track?"

He keeps it vague for the benefit of any curious ears at the hotel internet cafe. Alex confirms that yes, the second last payment from the client has come through with no deductions. That much is a relief, given the unscheduled pyrotechnics that had accompanied what should have been a clean and simple break-in into what was only a moderately well secured casino. The client may be eager to see the logistical briefing documents on the laptop Eames lifted from the visiting military delegation, but not eager enough to jeopardise the massive volume of trade its German-based operation enjoys with China. Deng and their local partners must have pulled off an unlikely escape from Macau, or died in the attempt, because if the client thought they were made, they'd wipe out the whole team if that's what it took to square things with Beijing.

"What next?" Alex asks, picking up the wine glass at his elbow without drinking.

"Miriam has the drop-off in Frankfurt," he replies, since Alex's knack with secure online connections has got them out of plenty of tight corners before. "I'll take the vase, and Frank's running decoy through Moscow. Stay out of trouble, kid. And if Arthur calls again, give him the number for CIA narcotics branch and tell him he can reach me there." 

When he logs on to the email of the corporate alias he used at Fischer Morrow – the sort of ambitious junior tycoon who might credibly have acquired a celebrated piece of Ming dynasty porcelain from dubious undisclosed sources – he has to skip two more messages from Arthur to get to what feels like a genuine purchase enquiry about the vase. The guy even wants it delivered to Ankara, opening up a few easy possibilities for running it through the lax security of land borders.

As he opens Arthur's first message, his mind is already sketching out a lengthy return journey through Istanbul then the Greek islands, some awful traveller dive like Corfu or Mykonos with sun and clear water, fast music and fast young bodies dancing to it all night long. It's been too long since he had time to get laid. That's the other drawback of working with family. 

_Let me walk you through it,_ Arthur has written. _I'll make it well worth your while. Time's short – call me or I'll come to you._

It's the imperious tone that does it. Eames can hear the condescension even over email. _No. Not looking for at least a month. Your boy's a liability._ For good measure he adds, _Fuck off._

The Fischer job was enough to make anyone go sour on dreamshare, an industry in which almost no-one has the length of reputation you can really trust, and in any case longstanding experience only means a greater chance of profound psychosis from all that mucking about with brain chemistry. 

He hovers over Arthur's second email, hesitates and clicks. _Watch your back,_ Arthur advises. _I'm seeing your name in Interpol traffic. Whatever you took, it's gone to the top. They're pulling in anyone who might be linked - FSB are on the case, India and the Turks too._

Fucking delightful. Too late to retrieve the email to his Turkish purchaser. Too late to avoid the cameras he passed in the foyer. All he can do is download one of Alex's more brutal viruses onto the system and hope it does enough damage to cover his trail.

**

"Where's your dad?"

"Massage," Miriam tells him, stepping back to let him slip into her room. "The shoulder he did on the door in Macau is locking up again."

"When's he back? We need to move our exit forward."

She picks up one of the blank terracotta bowls lined up on the bed. "That probably depends on whether massage is all they offer. And we can't. Regina's only just got the visas from her friend at the embassy, and even the fastest courier won't get them here in less than 24 hours. What do you think about this one?"

The splayed lip is a good match for the six-hundred-year-old original in the suitcase in Frank's cupboard, but something about the proportions is off. Anyone with an instinct for design will sense it's not quite right, and the forgery won't stand up to a second glance. 

"Try that one," he tells her. "A bit of tricky work with the pattern will fix the shape of the base."

She nods thoughtfully at it. "Anyway, the longer we wait, the more likely something bigger will give us a distraction."

Eames folds his arms over his chest, as if to hold in the anxious sense of rising urgency. "We stole a national treasure on loan from Beijing and set fire to three levels of a casino. If they don't know about the laptop specifically, they know it's a possibility we took it. The Chief Executive's wife is in hospital with a bullet in the spine, thanks to Deng's useless mate. Unless you've got word that Hong Kong is seceding, there is no distraction big enough to get us off their radar."

The glance she gives him makes him respond with a who-gives-a-fuck shrug. It's not just the international manhunt that's got on his nerves. While curt persistence is wholly in character for Arthur, the barrage of messages seems odder the more he thinks about it. There are other forgers, almost all of them easier for a man of Arthur's style to work with, and all of them wedded monogamously to extraction, always pitifully eager for the next chance to go under. 

_Or I'll come to you,_ Arthur had offered, or threatened. Things are volatile enough without adding the complications of Arthur's job, whatever it is. 

The icing on the cake is that Frank comes back from his massage with a proposition, and won't be swayed from it no matter how vehemently Eames derides it as a mid-life crisis masquerading as a business opportunity.

"We do need reliable local contacts if we're going to take any more work out here," Miriam eventually points out, coming down as per usual on the opposite side to Eames. "That's the lesson, isn't it? And with Deng's people off the table for good, we're not exactly spoiled for choice."

Keeping his voice low in the little hotel dining room, Frank reiterates that it's nothing hard core, mild enough for the local authorities to turn a blind eye to. Erotic massage for high end businessmen and tourists. Lap dancing, maybe a bit of fellatio on the side.

"Second-hand pimping's the best we can do now, is it?" Eames asks, at the end of his patience. 

"What?" Frank really is a master. He can put on good-humoured indignation as if he were discussing the possibility of putting up a garden wall that flouted local planning restrictions by half an inch, rather than dipping the family's toe into new and grubby waters. "The guy's got a brother-in-law high up in the army, Party connections that could take us places. All they want from us is a bit of start-up cash. Help them stash some assets outside the country. Julie can find them some real estate, and the dodgy side we pass on to Mario's lot."

Of course Miriam laughs at that. Uncle Mario's branch of the family specialises in replating stolen luxury cars and fencing them across Eastern Europe. A deft hand at disabling GPS and drilling off serial numbers doesn't mean they can shift into vice without falling on their arses. 

"Come on, kid," says Frank. "Just meet the guy."

The thing about working with family is you're all in it together. So you might as well sabotage it properly from the start rather than having to cut your way free of it later. 

"Sure," he says. "Love to."

**

In the back seat of a taxi returning from the airport, Eames eases open the paper wrapping and flicks through the brochures inside until he finds the three secreted Vietnamese visas. That puts them one step closer to home. 

The digital clock reads 12:15. _Fine Arts Museum, midday,_ Arthur's message of this morning had read. _We want you in on this one._

The taxi's going to drive right past it in a moment. He could still make it, if Arthur has been patient. It can't hurt to satisfy his curiosity about what's on offer and why it demands Eames's skill set in particular. After this unrelentingly awful week, he could milk a bit of entertainment out of playing hard to get, pay Arthur back for every time he's made Eames jump through hoops to get a brilliant idea approved into the official plan. 

"Just here thanks," he tells the driver, pointing, and their car pushes abruptly through a lane of traffic to get to the curb. 

Three cars behind them, a black sedan follows.

Refastening the package, he runs through what he knows of the local geography. To the left run broad, straight avenues heading towards Ho Chi Minh's tomb and therefore concentrated with police. On the other side, god knows what. Up ahead looks like promising laneways. He takes his chances with those and jumps out. 

The two or three voices behind him sound practised, like a well-drilled team, some branch of law enforcement. He darts into the first narrow alley he reaches, moving as fast as he dares without sabotaging his chances of disappearing among the street traffic, but this is one of those times he curses every hour he's spent with the weights or the punching bag, because no matter how hard he pulls his shoulders in, he goes crashing through the crowd like a wrecking ball, leaving behind empty spaces like arrows pointing right at him. 

He dodges round a bicycle, stumbles, and continues at a run. By some nightmarish twist, the laneways are leading him parallel with the boulevard he left, refusing to open up into the labyrinth he expected, and he can hear authoritative cries that sound like more officers joining the chase. He fishes out the three visas and dumps the brochures in an empty doorway. If his sense of direction isn't muddled, this alley is going to spill him back on the road from the museum, out in the open. He turns right, shoulders his way through a little vegetable market, and pulls up behind a group of tourists outside an ice cream parlour. A temporary haven at best. A block away, back on the main drag, a police car pulls up, lights flashing. 

"Eames."

When he glances over, Arthur is juddering to a halt on a motorcycle, twisting his way along the lane. The back of the bike is stacked with crates of bok choi. He's got a baseball cap pinning down his hair and a satchel across his chest. "Hurry up."

Eames would not be alive today if he didn't know how to dance to the tune of good fortune when he heard it play. Before any proud instincts can tell Arthur to go get knotted, he's swung a leg over the saddle and gripped on as Arthur kicks the bike clumsily back into motion, quickly finding the flow of traffic back onto the main road and slipping into it. With any luck, they won't think to look for two riders.

"What's top speed on this thing?"

"No fucking idea," Arthur snaps with even less cordiality than he usually reserves for Eames. "I've owned it for about two and a half minutes."

"Now might be a good time to find out."

Instead, Arthur swings onto the opposite side of the boulevard, diving back into side streets.

"The scene back there wasn't enough, you'd like me to break the speed limit in the middle of the CBD now? Jesus, I'm making as much of a spectacle as I can afford to right now."

He only carries them a few hundred bad-tempered metres further, into a quiet commercial neighbourhood, then pulls up out back of an office building. Dismounting, Arthur hands Eames his cap.

"Put this on."

He shrugs off his baggy tropical print shirt and passes that over too; it cinches uncomfortably around Eames's shoulders but the splash of blue and yellow is enough to fool the eye of anyone who's looking to match what he was wearing before. In the t-shirt he has on underneath, Arthur is almost unrecognisable, his damp, curling hair obscuring one eyebrow, about as far from the buttoned-up formality Eames had in his mind's eye as it's possible to get. His put-upon tone, however, is exactly what Eames remembers.

"This way," Arthur says, as if he'd co-opted Eames onto the team already. 

From the way he surveys every passing figure, bike and shop-front, under the guise of keen tourist curiosity, it looks like he came here without anyone to watch his back. They turn one corner before Arthur pulls him through the open door of an electronics shop, navigating the cluttered piles of stock to get them behind a screen of plasma televisions where he keeps an eye on the door. The shop owner is talking into his phone at the counter in the back corner of the shop.

"I had to hand over a lot of cash to get the bike. Call it two thousand. I'll throw it in free once we've nailed down the rest of the terms." 

Getting shown up by professionals is bad enough. But Arthur's a fucking amateur: lily-white hands with a comfortable upper-crust life waiting for him like a display room in a luxury store window if he hadn't stumbled into extraction. If there'd been a serious chase, Eames wouldn't have put money on Arthur being able to drive them out of it under a shower of bullets. Not topside, at any rate. 

"Over-reaching yourself, as always, Arthur. Thanks for the ride. I'll get the money to you."

As Arthur stows the bike keys in his satchel, Eames gets a glimpse of the butt of a pistol that looks like it was commissioned not long after the war, and wonders who he found for a local supplier at short notice. 

"Ten minutes," Arthur says, stepping in Eames's path. Anyone else might have started with a smile, but not him. "It won't hurt you to lie low for a bit. Come on."

Eames turns his attention to a set of surround sound speakers and decides to let him talk.

"You were involved in the hit in Macau, I suppose?" Eames doesn't respond. "Surprises me. I heard it was messy."

He says "messy" as if someone had got killed or caught, neither of which is true, yet. But Deng's team's stray bullet that struck the Chief Executive's wife was an unmitigated fuck-up, and if any of them fall into the hands of the Chinese secret service, it won't be pretty.

"Skip the chat," Eames tells him tersely, and only realises later that there was perhaps supposed to be a compliment in that.

Arthur puts his hands behind his back, businesslike, the same authoritarian stance that has driven Eames up the wall on every single job they've shared.

"Okay. Where do you stand with Cobol these days?"

"No fucking way. Anything else?"

Arthur doesn't move at that. The impression of flinching must come from the shifting light of the screens reflecting in his eyes. 

"Come on, Eames. Yes or no - are you on their books long term?"

Though he still doesn't answer, Eames doesn't mind letting his disdain for the idea of being in anyone's pocket come out in a snort. 

With another cautious glance at the door, Arthur waits until Eames sighs.

"I'm not on their books. Or yours either. Get that into your head or I'm going to have to find a permanent way to make the point."

"All right, noted," Arthur snaps, as if Eames's disinclination to drool all over his job offer was wildly unreasonable. "You were working for them last year – two weeks in Kisumu, then I heard you stopped in Nairobi on your way to the coast. What was that?"

"That, Arthur, was a private job which is none of your business." Arthur waves off the proprietor and makes an attempt at interest in the nearest television. "You'd never have let me near Saito if you thought I was Cobol's man. Bit late to bring it up now, don't you think?"

Leaving off his distracted attention to the volume buttons, Arthur looks at him hard.

"I want to know if you'll work against them."

Finally it falls into place. The persistence. The high stakes. The particular focus on Eames. 

"Ah." All the annoyance slouches right out of Eames's shoulders, because he knows which foot the boot is on now, and he's got no reason in the world to be gentle about it. "That job you botched on Saito. Your boy Dominic didn't do as good a job of squaring it away as you hoped, did he?" Arthur keeps his face very carefully blank. "Did he even try? Or is that another ticking bomb he left in your eminently capable hands?"

Poor Arthur, not a very good loser at the best of times. 

"Answer my question."

Eames grins. "So there's a price on your head. I'm going to let you tell me all about it. Then we'll see, won't we?"

He flicks off the telly before he leaves.

**

They sit in the back of a pho shop while Eames picks the beef slices out from the endless tangle of bean sprouts and rice noodles, taking his sweet time. Interestingly, when he brings them around to the present situation, Arthur starts by alluding to the danger to Cobb, and mentions the two children by name, as if Eames might be swayed by that sort of thing. 

"That is a shame," Eames commiserates. "Their father should have made more friends instead of enemies."

He sees a familiar expression: Arthur fighting the temptation to rise to Eames's bait. "Look, you could do the job in your sleep. It's not even a forge. I just need someone to get me inside Cobol HQ."

"Nairobi?"

"Or the plant in Kisumu."

"It doesn't make a difference," Eames tells him. "The grunt staff are all screened – even the cleaners are in-house. And management is militarised to the last man."

Arthur folds his hands, leaving his cooling cup of tea untouched. "That doesn't matter. I'm not extracting."

Normally it's a pleasure when someone defies Eames's assumptions, but this revelation leaves a bitter taste in his mouth.

"I see," he says, poking at a knot of mint and coriander. "Well I don't do assassinations. If you'd approached this in a friendlier way, I might have been willing to give you a name."

When Arthur leans in, the fluorescent light catches the accumulated oil down the sides of his nose, all around his hairline, the unslept tightness around his eyes. He sounds like he's on his last reserves of patience. "I don't want your mob contacts, Eames. I can get my own. Just get me in and get me out again. If you're worried about the principle of it, there'll be a hundred thousand to help you sleep at night."

It's deadly serious money. And for the risk of alienating a lucrative and unforgiving client with fingers in nearly every oil, gas and mineral pie in Africa, it bloody well should be.

"Think about it," Arthur prompts, checking the entrance yet again, and the back door too. "The price has got a bit of room to move."

Cobol has endlessly deep pockets. He can picture Arthur running the same negotiation with all the various contacts whose palms he's had to grease to stay alive this far. None of it would have come cheap, and when he thinks about it, Arthur has always played his own game, never asking for favours but never giving them either. For someone who's never bothered to invest in the currency of mateship, the price for loyalty must be high – higher if he's known to be desperate. It's a wonder he's got two hundred left to bargain with now.

"Is Cobb putting in for this?"

Cobb is well liked, at least by those who lack first-hand experience of his potential for self-absorbed treachery. Better liked than Arthur. And the creepy charisma of his spectacular decline makes a certain kind of person feel protective. 

"What do you care where the money's coming from?" And there is fierce, no-bullshit Arthur, annoyed enough to forget he's supposed to be buttering Eames up for his help, and angry about something that is more than Eames's pointless curiosity. "If I say you'll get it, then you'll get it."

Eames knows this. Even in his position on the periphery of the industry he gets a modicum of news, and the only people who claim Arthur has double-crossed them are the ones who aren't to be trusted themselves. But he says, "I thought you said you were here on your own. Sounds to me like you're still working for Cobb."

Arthur is the sort of man who can always be relied on to have a pocket torch when the lights go out unexpectedly in the middle of a job, or the right length of rope, or a duplicate of the mark's letterbox key. He is, however, a bloody awful judge of character, or he'd never have let a loose cannon like Cobb choose his teams for him. 

Arthur says, "You'd be doing Dom a favour."

As if his professional relationship with Eames is so rotten that he's got better prospects putting it on behalf of that lying piece of shit than asking in his own right for help. 

"I don't owe him any favours," Eames says pleasantly. "Thanks for lunch. Don't make any more trouble or I'll take you down for the bounty myself."

**

He's a little offended on Arthur's behalf when he calls Celine at her semi-legit pharmacy back at home to find out how much the bounty is. Marginally more than the price on Cobb, it's still not enough to yield a profit against the cost and risk of getting under his highly competent defences. Someone at Cobol must be smart, though, because if anyone sells Arthur out, it won't be about the money. He's held himself capable and self-contained and aloof enough that his arrogance is infamous even among extractors who've never met him first-hand. Someone, eventually, will take him down for the satisfaction alone.

Eames can imagine the sort who will do it, too. The first generation of dream workers – Arthur and Cobb's generation, technically trained and plumb full of smug intellectual curiosity – has been giving way to a new demographic, of which Eames was a forerunner. Organised crime wants its cut of the extraction trade, and is slowly getting it. Even the Ivy League credentialed chemists are starting to give way to back-yarders who started in amphetamines, like Belanova and the Tierney brothers. 

Cobb has slipped out of the trade. Mal is dead. The Shanghai network have, one by one, gone legit. Da Souza's team is coming off two unlucky failures. Finishing Arthur off would be like toppling the bronze statue of yesterday's despot, and his come-uppance is widely considered to be overdue.

On the round-about walk back to his hotel, ducking through markets and crowded lanes to cover his tracks, he contemplates whether there's something he can offer – an acquaintance he could toss the job to. But in the end, Arthur has been making this bed for himself every superior minute of every superior day of his entire superior fucking career. It isn't Eames's problem. 

**

By late afternoon, no matter how many times he reminds himself that keeping a low profile is more important than ever, he finds himself throwing down the guidebook from which he has managed to digest about a half page all day. He picks up his wallet and sunglasses. 

"Hey-" Miriam calls through the closed door of her room at the sound of his step.

She's testing out paints on some broken terracotta pieces, matching the blues and time-dulled whites to the dragon vase. With a restless kind of dread, Eames thinks of how many hours' work lie ahead of them to replicate the pattern onto the bowl and plate. 

He tells her that he's going to check out the neighbourhood around the massage joint Frank wants to invest in, on the east side of the river, and as he's saying it he decides to do it.

"You're on board then?" she says dubiously, sitting up straight and stretching out her back. "Are you going to Varna after we're done? Charlie said he wanted you."

Some days he might as well have an appointment book, and a secretary, and a fucking cubicle somewhere depressingly fluorescent. He looks out the window. In the building opposite, a girl in a white school blouse with a red scarf tie is raising her pen over an open book, thinking. 

"Might have other things on," he answers. "Besides, his sales pitch was half-arsed."

She laughs. "Too good for a real estate swindle now, are you?"

The markets will be busy in the late afternoon. Full of gossip and helter skelter bargaining and tethered crabs shifting around in buckets. 

"I fancy a bit more adrenalin than cracking my knuckles at a few low-life investors. All that paperwork might be heaven on a stick to Charlie, but I'd just be churning out fake title deeds and holding a gun on them at the end to make sure they cut their losses and run when they realise they've been done over. Any monkey can do that for him. Even Freddy."

She peers around him towards the stairs that lead down to Frank's first storey room, checking they are empty. "You put Vince and Freddy at the trigger when you expect it to need pulling – their own father would be the first to agree. You couldn't find small enough words to explain to them what bluffing means." Her expression hardens. "You don't think he asked you just because family comes free?"

To be honest, he hadn't thought past the fact that white collar cons are as boring as fuck compared to thieving from foreign military or an armed-to-the-teeth billionaire. His brother's line of work is taking him inch by chilling inch towards the right side of the law.

"A bad idea anyway, both of us on the same job. Not until Dad's back in the game." 

She considers. "I've got a gig in The Hague. Break and enter on a research facility. Almost definite. Reggie's putting the team together." She adds, "No paperwork."

He pulls on Arthur's baseball cap. "Keep yourself busy, kiddo."

He wanders over the bridge, far enough on the other side of the river to get a feel for the unassuming streets, turning back before he becomes too conspicuous away from the tourist tracks. It's hard as a foreigner to get a fix on the mood. On the street level, between the warehouses, he finds the usual mix of narrow shop-fronts and casual family cook-ups starting on the pavement. The real Hanoi exists behind those industrious facades. He fishes out a 5000 dong note for a small bottle of water. "One dollar," says the vendor, who could be anywhere from Eames's age to a young-looking fifty. Eames gets him to chuck in a bunch of bananas and some gum as well.

With the bars not open yet, it's impossible to guess which ones provide back room services. Out of the corner of his eye, Eames watches the men conversing in small groups or tinkering with their motorcycles and tries to pick them out. The sex trade attracts a type: men who are reckless enough to flout the law but not game to take on anything more dangerous than demoralised women whose provincial families are too far away to help them. Prostitution is no game for a man with any pride in his work. 

If he has his way, they'll bleed these club owners for higher and better contacts – someone who's open to the kind of offer the family might like to make – and drop them before they get started. He'll get Frank to shift tomorrow's meeting forward so they can find out what's on offer. 

When he gets back, Arthur is sitting outside the little hardware store opposite the hotel, holding a set of screwdrivers and talking to the proprietor and the university-aged son who hangs around the shop at lunch time. He blends in well: perched comfortably on the little plastic chair in a blue and black synthetic football shirt that could have come off the racks around the market. But Eames knows what to look for now. The watch on his wrist has a distinctly European simplicity. The new sandals have left abrasions on his feet. Arthur's second toe is longer than his big toe – they meet at a skewed angle – and Eames files away that fact with other useless things he knows about Arthur, in case he should ever need to forge him, or ID his body in a less than ideal state. 

Arthur takes his time finishing a story about a factory in Guangdong before he turns to acknowledge Eames standing at his shoulder.

As soon as the door of Eames's room is closed, he cuts to the chase. 

"I found another thirty."

Eames's mind was already leaping forward to the worst that could happen, thinking of the knife in his right pocket or how the angle of the open bathroom door might help him if it came to a close-quarters fight. He has to readjust. 

"One thirty, Eames. A hundred and thirty thousand and I'll owe you a favour." 

He puts both hands behind his back and waits. Eames is used to haggling over prices, knows all the commercial, emotional and egotistical pressure points that can be used to lever a price up or down. A one-third jump, all in one go, is redolent of desperation. Or imminent treachery.

He says, "About time you tapped Cobb for his share."

"What makes you think it's his?"

"Come on. He's not that quiet about it. His family has money. Top-end real estate – Rhode Island, virtually next door to Martha's Vineyard."

For an instant, the false calm slips aside and Eames can practically smell Arthur's irritation, as strong as it ever was around a strategy table when Eames was defending a plan that relied on too much luck and too little calculation. 

"It's mainland, five miles in from the coast. It belongs to his step-father – that's his _estranged_ step-father, Eames. After fourteen months on the run, he's got nothing, and until I take care of Cobol, he can't make anything. Believe it or not, I have looked into it." 

"That bad?" Eames says, and decides it's safe enough to sit on his unmade bed.

Arthur shoots a harried glance at the window, as if in proxy for Eames. "The money on the table speaks for itself. I know that. Now let's nail this down so we can get to work."

Leaning back on his elbows, Eames takes his time, too comfortable to worry that Arthur is quietly cataloguing every sock and toothbrush that isn't hidden away in a suitcase.

"If I got caught – if they even suspected me, I'd never get another job with Cobol or anyone who wants to do business with them. What do you think that's worth to me?" 

"You'll always be freelance. You're not the type to work in Cobol's pocket." 

"You're right, I find them easier to fleece from a healthy distance. Fact remains, I'd like to keep doing it." 

"Look, if it's not enough, I'll be straight with you, we're wasting our time. I can't lay hands on any more right now. Take it or leave it." 

That's the sort of ultimatum desperate men use when they've got one last deal-maker left up the sleeve, so he waits. Tips his head back, overplaying his performance of thinking about it really hard. Mind you, it does bear some thinking about. He doesn't know where he stands with Cobol after the Fischer job, and he certainly isn't naive enough to imagine it escaped their notice that he vanished from Mombasa the same day he met with Cobb. 

Arthur says, "I heard you're looking for local connections. I know people in the State Department. I can find out the lie of the land here. Put you in touch with someone who can help. Kneecap the competition if you like." 

It's not a deal-maker after all. Eames has been working the underside of legal trade for the whole of his adult life, and his family for two generations before that. South-East Asia may be a new venue, but the game's the same they've always played.

"I realise this is going to be a challenge for you to accept, Arthur, but sometimes you have to take no for an answer."

When he's angry, Arthur doesn't hide it. On the first job they shared, the client nearly pulled the plug on three occasions, each time because of a condescending glance or a blunt turn of phrase that Arthur let slip when his temper was up. Now, though, he looks carefully blank.

"At least you're being straight with me," he says finally. Then, he does frown. "Listen, Eames. I know we've had our differences. You don't owe me anything. But can I be sure that it won't get back to Cobol that I asked you?"

Eames takes his time. Even if his natural sympathy is all with Arthur, the renegade hunted down by an unsportingly well-resourced adversary, it's better for any future negotiations to keep that fact up his sleeve.

"Sure," he says eventually.

Arthur reaches out for an uncharacteristic handshake, as if touching flesh to flesh imparts some sort of seal of faith that might render Eames's promise more secure. His grip is too firm, showing signs of stress. After releasing Eames's hand, he seems to hesitate. 

"Look, I appreciate it, all right."

Pulling his satchel round in front of him where Eames can see it, he unfastens both straps and draws out a clip-fastened pile of papers which he tosses on the bed by Eames's thigh. 

"There's a few holes you could fix," Arthur says as he walks out.

Fanned out on top is a scan of his grandfather's death certificate which shows, scribbled over but still barely legible, the address in Pointe-Rouge that now houses Frank, Lydia, Grandmother Margot and any extended family members currently between residences; a planning application for Vince and Freddy's club in Belsunce; a google maps print-out showing Uncle Mario's wrecking yard; a membership listing for Paris Saint-Germain FC with Alex's real name on it; and a blurry photograph from a corporate espionage job three years back under which Arthur has hand-written the words _James Arnaud Engelvin_ and three birth dates, one of which is perfectly accurate.

"Listen," Eames calls after him. He takes a good while to come back to the doorway. "You can't trust everyone not to sell you out. If you've got any other contacts you want to try, run them by me first. Do it before you leave – I'm not going to give you anything in writing."

Arthur nods and doesn't press for anything more.

Once he's gone, Eames locks the door to take a much needed piss. Unbidden, plans start to come together in his mind. How he'd extricate himself, if he were Arthur. They all come back to two possibilities, and both of them involve getting inside Cobol's HQ. 

Gut instinct makes him check the window. Good thing he does. On the street outside, Arthur is talking to Miriam. The empty bag slung over her shoulder means she's probably on her way to the markets to pick up more paint or glaze for the set to match the antique. There's a cautious distance between them but she doesn't seem to take Arthur for a threat. And why would she? Eames has told her next to nothing, and right now he looks like butter wouldn't melt in his mouth, eyes crinkling against the last sunlight. 

Arthur smiles. It's directed at Miriam but, for a moment, his face turns up towards Eames's window. When he gets down to the street, all his danger instincts on fire, they have both disappeared.

**

Eames has to spend an hour after that bluffing his way through the meeting at the club, trying to keep his feet under the table to an impatient tap instead of the ruckus they want to make. Their potential new business partners are two brothers in their early thirties and an aunt whose status is ambiguous. It's hard to read them across the cultural divide. They are flashier than the mobsters he was dealing with in Macau, much more inclined to talk up their contacts and their power, the younger one hardly bothering to obscure the illegal K-54 tucked behind his belt. Eames's instincts say this is small-town bluster. But it could be something subtler than that, something designed to be underestimated. 

Even if Miriam didn't know how to take care of herself, he can't figure out any way that Arthur could use her to his long term advantage. Still, he can't rely on Arthur's lack of creative thinking anymore. He's surprised Eames more deeply over the last few days than in the entire history of their acquaintance. 

The aunt observes the nephews while they talk, and gestures the barman with a twitch of her head to bring them drinks. Eames likes her a little. Even through the older boy's translation, it's clear that her comments about their sordid human trade are business-like, lacking any gloss of boasting. So they should be. It takes no special genius to threaten solitary women into doing what they're told. All it takes is generous payoffs to authorities and a willingness to dispense with basic humanity, and anyone prepared to go that far ought to set their sights on something more ambitious than a trade that generates pretty meagre profits per pound of flesh.

Pimps are not Eames's kind of people. Or Frank's either, but they all want something promising to take home after the close shave in Macau.

Eames lets go of the twisted coaster and puts his hands under the table. He can't afford to play games with Arthur. He'll give him two options, and two minutes to choose between them. Either he'll get onto his best contact at Cobol and set up a peace meeting where Arthur can beg or haggle for his life, or he'll tell them as precisely as he can where Arthur can be found. 

The aunt cuts off the meeting just as Frank has very nearly got the name of their army contact who's the go-to man when laws need bending. When they're shaking hands, the older brother calls an instruction to the barman and, despite the aunt's objection, two young women appear. 

"Try before you buy," says the brother, pleased with himself, wearing the knowing grin of a salesman. 

The girls look like industry veterans, not too far either side of twenty, nails glossy but chipped. They glance at Eames with supreme boredom, old hands who know how to get a man off with the stopwatch efficiency of a ten minute massage.

"I know the product pretty well," Eames tells him. "Unless you've put in some new features, I don't need a trial."

Frank, who has a second wife with mob ancestry and two well armed and fiercely protective sons at home, doesn't look that pleased with him as they walk back to the hotel. "Bit off your game today, Jimmy."

Eames strides ahead of him, not exactly anxious but wasting no time. 

"Never mind that. Next time, I'll take care of the big-shot nephews so we can see the back of the lot of them. You get the information out of the boss."

"All the brains in the family, this one," Frank says, affability shading a reprimand for anyone familiar enough to pick it. He drops back and lets Eames outstrip him. "Look sharp."

**

The bar around the corner from the hotel doesn't usually open until after dark but Miriam and Arthur are in it when Eames gets back. Miriam is easy to pick out as she leans into the white light that falls over the pool table, lining up an ambitious shot that brings her cue in at a steep 60 degrees to the baize. It takes a bit longer to pick Arthur out of the shadows along the windowless wall. He's watching the steady cradle of her fingers rather than the shift of curves beneath her dress as she strikes. 

The shot banks off the far side then the headboard before it bumps the yellow, which crawls to a halt about two centimetres short of the opposite pocket. Arthur's laughing as he steps forward and touches the cold edge of his second glass to Miriam's bare shoulder so that she takes it from him and sips from it as he takes his turn. Arthur is slow to line up his shot, his trademark efficiency conspicuously absent. He looks loose, in a way Eames can't remember seeing him even in dream levels, as he talks over his shoulder with his hair falling in his eyes, letting the cue sag each time he neglects it in favour of whatever they're discussing.

Arthur has no idea how to make small-talk, but he's a mine of information on obvious and unexpected topics, and probably knows how to disguise the process of sharing and acquiring it as genuine human interaction. Even when he's not smiling, there's residual warmth in the corners of his eyes, and Eames thinks that Cobb's a bloody fool for putting Arthur behind a gun instead of using this side of him in extractions.

"They've been caught out before, though," Arthur is saying as Eames slips the door closed behind him. He leans right up the length of the table to get the white on the angle he wants, his spine stretching easily.

"Only in summer," Miriam tells him. Arthur focuses intently on the ball, testing the shot with the cue grazing over his thumb, but still listening to her answer. "The Director of Acquisitions is a film buff. She goes to Cannes, Venice and Toronto, every year, without fail." This will be one of the galleries she contracted to while she was learning the ropes, probably the Somerset. It's a bit close to disclosing trade secrets, even if Arthur isn't competition in that particular line of business. "When she's away, it's the only time you can get them to take a piece that's short on documentation. Once they've bought it, though-" 

She pauses while he takes the shot, aiming ambitiously to deflect the yellow right across the top board even though the red is the better target, and misses by a whisker. The yellow wobbles over the corner of the pocket and refuses to tip.

"That's why they're worth the trouble," Miriam finishes. "Once they work out they've been had, they'll lean on the most respected experts in Europe to swear it's authentic, no matter what it takes."

She shoves the table hard with her hip and the yellow finally falls.

"Nice," Arthur says, laughing like someone who lives the kind of life made up of easy talk and mildly surprising turns on the pool table. "Localised earth tremors, not something you see very often this far south."

Eames thinks of the internal security job out of Darwin when there'd been nothing to do but soak up the tropical heat until their tourist-issue t-shirts clung to them, and hide away from the worst of the afternoon sun, emptying beer cans in the pool room. Back then, Arthur had played the game like a mortal duel, steely and ruthlessly strategic even up against Cobb, arguing every disagreement over house rules with the gravity of a full criminal appeal.

"I'm going to ignore the Federation rules on acts of god and call it a foul," Arthur adds, still grinning.

"Is this a private game you're playing, Arthur, or can anybody join?"

The smile is snuffed out quick as a lamp in an air raid the moment he lays eyes on Eames. Arthur's spine stiffens to match the cue by his side, like a soldier coming into the presence of an outranking officer, or a mortal threat. 

"Your shot," Arthur says without inflection and makes for the bar. 

Miriam greets him with an unrepentant glance. Eames pins her cue to the table.

"Problem, Jimmy? You can't be worried about him. He's straight up."

"You know that, do you?"

"You said it."

Eames most certainly did not.

"Well, as good as," she goes on, shaking his hand off. "You said he was the go-to man if you ever went missing on a job."

He leans on the side of the table and watches her play, her jaw going tight, not just with the game. 

"Maybe I meant he's the one most likely to know where I'm buried." 

"No, that's not how you said it." Her jab knocks the green, her last, over the edge and she follows the white on its rebound, going on, low. "You also said he had a stick up his arse big enough to see from space."

Miriam financed her year of London internships by passing information to the Met on black market art sales, taking payments from both sides. Her bullshit detector is usually better tuned than this.

"And you want to find out first-hand, do you kid?" He glances over to where Arthur is extracting an envelope from his satchel full of tricks, slipping out clean bills to pay with. "Don't set your heart on it. If he puts it about, he does it outside the trade."

Instead of responding to that, she picks out the last of Arthur's striped balls tucked in behind the black and sinks it with a single forceful rebound. "He just happened to be in the neighbourhood, did he?"

"Is that what he told you?"

"No. He said he's talking you into a job." 

She looks at him as if trying to read in his face the reasons he might turn down good money after the profit they just burned getting out of Macau. "You know Charlie can do Varna without you. And my Dutch job's got a long window."

It's not as though Eames hasn't thought about it. Gone through his contacts at Cobol HQ and weighed up whether he could afford to wipe one of them out if he did this thing for Arthur.

But his musings keep ending up at the same place. "He's in Cobb's pocket."

Eames doesn't need a stand-in for his mother, who came over from Oxford to interview Eames's grandfather for a provocative angle on her art history PhD, impulsively married his youngest son and stuck around long enough for her two boys to reach school age before she packed them both off to a fourth-storey flat in Marylebone and sent them back to Marseille every Christmas for a gruelling church service, a shambolic family dinner, and a tantalising glimpse of the trade they would both, in the end, come back to. But trade is now the one subject Eames's mother forbids, and Miriam is a handy substitute between jobs when the professional competition between them reaches its lowest ebb. The Fischer job was the sort of thing that had inevitably come up in the occasional late-night chat.

"Still? After he shafted you all?"

Eames rips off a stray strip of felt from the rim of the table. "Oh, Dom Cobb can do no wrong. The fucker graduated from some Ivy League tosspot factory with an undergrad from the bloody Sorbonne, so naturally your boy Arthur thinks he's somewhere between Einstein and God Almighty."

He doesn't much care for the way she looks at him then.

"So is this your delicate way of telling me to stay the fuck off him then?" she says, focused back on the black, idly testing the angles with her eyes.

Eames shrugs. "Just giving you the facts." 

She picks her position and lines up the shot. "Your tastes have changed." 

Eames's tastes, when it occasionally comes to men, lean towards the kind known as temporary. Idle pick-ups in clubs and gyms and upmarket bars. Never work contacts, except occasionally the reckless and prematurely doomed sort of personality he can be fairly confident won't last long enough to have to work with a second time. 

"You know he's ditching," he says under his breath, leaning down beside her as Arthur puts three cans down on the far edge of the table.

"You think?" she murmurs back and strikes the black too hard right across the face of the side pocket. 

They spend a few more minutes chasing the black as close to the pockets as they can get whilst remaining ostensibly unable to sink it. But the laughter has vanished, and the easy chat shrivelled up and died the moment Arthur came under the scrutiny of someone who knows him better. 

"Unlucky," Eames comments acidly upon yet another near miss, and Miriam dumps the cue across the table.

"Some days you just can't make them stick, huh." She retrieves her shopping bag from under the corner table, and adds for Arthur's benefit or Eames's irritation, "Stay in touch. I might want a rematch, somewhere a bit closer to home."

Arthur considers, rekindling the easy smile that should not belong to a man with a seven figure price on his head. "Sure. Let me know the place."

When she's gone, Eames sinks the black first shot, and Arthur stops smiling. They pick a table with a view of the door.

"I gave you your answer. What the fuck is this?"

"Calm down," Arthur says, hardly calm himself with his hand clenched around his untouched beer can. "A man can change his mind."

"You put everything you have on the table already. Why would I?"

Arthur's attention narrows down to a point over Eames's shoulder, as it does when he's problem solving, and Eames thinks this is where he's going to say it. This is where he's finally going take their bargain off the plane of business and make it personal, appeal to their history, boil down the head-butting and occasional moments of unexpected connection between them to some approximation of friendship and ask for a goddamn favour.

But instead he says, "I'm open to suggestions."

As if the way to Eames's loyalty is a matter of haggling out the right price. As if he's come to Eames of all his many contacts because he wants someone who can be bought, at a price he can afford.

Eames spreads his legs out under the table and lounges in his chair, waits for his anger to turn cool so he can use it with a clear head. 

"I went to see a man about an illegal titty bar this afternoon."

"The one up by West Lake?" Arthur says. "Yes."

Miriam wouldn't have given away anything as exact as a location, so Arthur must have other sources. He thinks back to the girl who tailed him on the first day.

"They have a civilised way of doing business over here," Eames goes on, feeling his way towards the deal-breaker he wants. "When we were done haggling on the price and the timeframe, he offered me the services of one of his lady employees, on the house. To sweeten the deal."

Arthur laughs as if they bonded over pussy all the time. "You want me to procure you a lap dancer, Eames? Come on. Give me a challenge."

And there it is. Sometimes the only way to get rid of a persistent customer is to price yourself out of the market.

"You don't have any lap dancers, Arthur. You don't even have Cobb anymore. There's just you."

Arthur looks like he wants to kill him, and not in the metaphorical way Eames is used to from their past run-ins over tactics. Then he straightens his coaster and says carefully,

"I didn't realise you valued that sort of thing so highly. You can buy it on the street here, same as anywhere."

"Oh, I'll have the one thirty as well."

"Not a chance. You've changed the deal." Arthur finally takes a swig from his beer and sticks him with a steely look. "The price goes down by half."

Eames has got a suite of expressions for covering up the feeling of being wrong-footed; he puts on his blankest one now. Arthur, in his best business voice, is still talking terms, like the shift in currency is only a matter of re-valuation.

"You do rate yourself highly," Eames tells him. "I can buy my own whorehouse for the difference."

"So buy your own whorehouse."

"One twenty. But you're at my beck and call until we start the job." 

For the first time, Arthur looks faintly disgusted. He leans back and takes a long drag of his drink, and another, and the quiet reminds Eames that he might not have so many drinks left if he doesn't find a way to set things right with Cobol.

Arthur adds, exactly as if they were fleshing out an extraction for a client who stood a realistic chance of double-crossing them, "Seventy five. And there would have to be ground rules."

"No. You've seen me work. I don't take stupid risks and even in a dream you've never seen me put a bullet in someone for the fun of it. If that's not good enough, turn me down, because you're not getting the bloody covenant on civil and political rights." 

This is where Arthur should call his bluff, shoot down the deal, and move the fuck on to someone who needs the work badly enough to put up with his autocratic, uninspired way of running things. 

He doesn't.

"You can have a hundred. But I want a run-down of all your ideas in the morning. Names, dates, requisition list, everything up front. This is going to be the most thorough job of your life." His efficiency makes Eames wonder if he's misunderstood their terms. Then he adds, "And you had better fucking hope that you never end up in the sort of jam where you need to come to me for help."

There, Eames thinks as he finishes his drink beside the now empty seat. He said the word. He could have saved them both a lot of unnecessary complications if he'd got his mouth around it earlier. 

**


	2. Working overtime

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Arthur pays his price and Eames gets to work.

So much of this city seems to be made of plastic – modern, disposable, an easy-wipe-down surface carrying no organic imprint of history or texture. Eames downs his third or fourth drink at the plastic table outside the beer cafe two blocks over from the hotel.

It's pushing on towards eleven and the time he'd arranged to be at Arthur's hotel room was half ten.

"What does he expect for pulling you out of a half-done job?" Frank scoffs. "It's not as if he's blood."

What Frank brought to the family when he married into it, adding to the Engelvin reputation for safe cracking, cat burglary and fencing stolen works of art, was ten brilliant years as a con man, and a friendly acquaintance with organised crime. The secret of his success is an uncanny instinct for people. Disinterested in details like Arthur's skill set, he only wants a snapshot of the loyalties in play, where the debts are owed.

"Extraction's no different from any other racket," Eames tells him. "The industry's not that big. You know the going rate for a job and you don't hammer up your prices when the other guy's weak. Because next time it might be you who's getting bled."

They are talking about the cash transaction. Among all the slang in Eames's multilingual vocabulary, he has not been able to find a single expression that makes the other currency in play sound anything less than ugly. 

"So why did you?" Frank asks.

Eames puts his empty can down on the table and dips his little finger into the hole in the spout of it, to feel the bite of the metal edges. Because it was Arthur. Because he could have put a lot more effort into working out the right way to ask. Because he never gives away a shot on the pool table, ever.

"Not like you to make it personal, Jim," Frank goes on as if he'd given an answer. "Like your old man says, can't buy a pint with revenge, can you?" 

No-one knows that better than Frank, who lost his first wife, Miriam's mother, to a chipped balcony tile and a frayed rope in a rappelling array that his mate Mitch, who was running the break-in, could have taken better care of. Although Mitch was best man at his second wedding six years later, he would never hold the life of a family member in his hands again. 

"Save it." Frank is sore about the lack of progress on the titty bar deal, the prospect of going home without something new to make Lydia put another chair through the patio door, and the fact that Eames is taking another outside job that puts him on the line for a fixed fee instead of a share of takings. When he's thwarted, even Frank's uncanny instincts can be wrong. "I'm playing this by trade rules. Professional. Services all agreed in advance and any sign of trouble, it's the first flight out for me."

"You said that straight up, did you?"

"As good as."

The beer can makes a hollow sound as Eames taps it. There's a distinctive murmur from the room inside that both of them recognise. An unlikely fall of dice or cards. Frank's attention starts to wander. 

"Careful, kid," Frank says as he stands up to investigate. "Sounds to me like you're a step away from your first tax return."

**

Head down, cap sitting low, Eames makes his way quickly down the dark length of the lake towards the embassy quarter, through the thinning crowd of tourists and college-aged kids in groups.

The thing about Cobol is that it's as deeply divided as any big company staffed by ambitious men hired for their ability to balance on the knife edge of legality. The blokes in Kisumu with zinc dust in their pores dislike the supervisors who drive in from Nairobi in their noisy, low-down cars. Kenyan ops look down on the Rwandan plant as third world, even though its heavily laundered payload of minerals from the DRC is twice as lucrative, and on Angola as something out of the Stone Age. Anyone strutting in from European head office or legal is universally loathed. The different factions talk to each other in terse fuck-off emails, if they talk at all. It won't be the biggest challenge of his career to get Arthur through the fissures in corporate unity.

The staff are stacking chairs in the terrace bar on the ground floor of the Metropole, the last low-key cocktails just finished. He slips into the back stairs while the reception desk is busy with a couple of late arrivals having a disagreement with a cyclo driver. 

In the quiet of the stairwell, his reason for being here seems bizarre and abstract. It's hard to recall, without the irritant of Arthur's physical presence and the infinite sense of superiority he never makes quite enough effort to hide, the certainty that he needed to be taken down a peg or two. Eames's sense of righteousness has soured into something distinctly uncomfortable. 

In any case, from the immediate death-blow Arthur dealt to Belanova's awful bath-house plan on their second job, Eames had noted for his mental inventory the way that Arthur spoke about gay culture with matter-of-fact assurance based either on direct experience or on the frank confidences of someone close. It might not be any more than a slightly distasteful inconvenience, to Arthur, to deliver his end of the bargain, let alone the well deserved lesson Eames had dreamt, in his most vindictive moments, of dealing out.

Taking off his cap to ruffle his hair, he can't warm himself to the effort of conflict. He runs his mind over other currencies that Arthur might be willing to substitute for this one that he never expected to be accepted. Information. Contacts. 

The pretty room service attendant who holds the door open for him on the second floor gives him a professional smile, the sort that vanishes quickly. He wonders what it would be like if the stakes were different. Whether Arthur would be sitting on the bed right now, waiting, secreting a few condoms close at hand, rinsing his mouth out with a glass of water, putting on the television for distraction. He wonders whether Arthur is the sort to take the awkward edges off with liquor first or get right to the point. Whether he keeps turning on that closely guarded smile afterwards. He wonders what it would be like if Arthur were just some guy he had picked up at a random bar and unexpectedly clicked with.

When Arthur opens the door, his hair is slicked back, every trace of human weakness smoothed over with gel as if for the sort of job where he might have to bluff or threaten his way out of a corner. His cheeks are smooth-shaven and his trouser cuffs are resting on European leather. 

"This is what you call ten-thirty, is it?" he snaps in a blast of derision that has clearly been fifty minutes on the boil.

The trouble with Arthur is he's all locked up. Sure, detachment is an essential character trait in their industry, but he's far more obvious about it than most. He never affects nonchalance, never bothers to feign friendship, never shrugs "It's only a job", and cuts dead anybody who does. Arthur never drops the ball. In fact, he makes a show of how well secured he is, smug as the head office of Deutsche Bank behind seven-foot stone walls with iron bars on the windows and cameras covering every door. And Eames, Eames has got thieving in his blood.

"Why so dolled up, darling? At least take that bloody jacket off."

Arthur hesitates, planting his feet as if deciding whether to draw the first battleline here or save it for more important stakes. 

"Worst thing you could do," Eames tells him, "is change your mind half way."

The jacket stays on, but he walks into the bedroom, leaving the doorway empty for Eames to come through.

"Get in here. I don't back out once the deal's done."

**

The hotel buffet the next morning has every neat and lukewarm dish that a connoisseur of hotel breakfasts could hope for, but it turns out to be one of those rare mornings where Eames wants nothing more than his battered sixties gas stove back in Marseille and whatever he can salvage out of the fridge.

Before he has even set down his plate of sausage and bacon, Arthur has slid over a super-slim screen the size of a greeting card.

"Is this current?"

"Bugger," Eames replies. "I meant to try the omelette."

"You're on the clock now." Arthur pushes out the free chair with his foot. "You work all day, you get your wage at night. Sit down. Drink your coffee. As long as there's a live hen left in the city, the Metropole won't run out of omelette."

There is nothing unusual in Arthur's no-frills conversation. He looks Eames in the eye, without any sense of discomfort, but also without the challenge Eames expects to see. Trust Arthur to be the type who moves on from sex as inconsequentially as from a nod or a handshake, immune to the subtle traces it should be leaving on the way they relate to one another. Apart from shadows under his eyes so faint they may well be Eames's imagination, he looks completely unaffected. His indifference is yet another quiet, enduring insult. It's hard to be sure whether this is the smartest form of revenge, or just an extension of his usual disregard for Eames as anything other than an occasionally useful set of criminal skills. 

On the screen is a schematic of the security systems of the ground floor of Cobol HQ in Nairobi. When he zooms in with the touch of fingertips, the page bears handwriting too faint to read and the smudges of a hasty scan.

"It's recent enough," Eames tells him. "But there's a second back-up generator now, and I heard a pretty solid rumour they've put infra-red in the whole of the plant room." 

The cup Arthur was sipping from pauses, suspended, in front of him. It jolts Eames, watching the silver-rimmed white china hang perfectly still from one distracted finger, to remember that he knows the surprisingly work-roughened texture of those hands now. Fingers, he thinks of their grip last night, that know what they're doing. Hands that don't drop things.

"Do you need something hot off the press?" Eames says, a half-offer.

He gets an economical shake of head for a reply. "If my source is unreliable, we're better off to go for Kisumu instead. You spent more time there. Nairobi was always a long shot."

It takes Eames about as long to pull up the plan for the office block at the Kisumu plant as it does to polish off his plate of bacon and bland sausages.

Arthur very nearly sounds impressed when Eames gives the device back to him.

"They would have cancelled your access the moment they knew you'd met Cobb in Mombasa."

"They blocked the channels they knew about, yes."

In any walk of life, it pays to be on good terms with IT personnel, and it pays long-term dividends to help a sys admin with a deep distrust of dream technology get a militarisation sign-off without so much as a needle going in his arm. Arthur scrolls down the plan and back up again.

"Senior management are on the third floor, I assume?" Arthur asks.

"Some are." He has been evasive about just who he has his sights set on, and what he intends to do with them. All Eames knows is that he needs a twenty minute window in the office block. "Who did you have in mind?"

"Who's not on three then?"

That patient, unmovable look takes Eames back to the night before too, Arthur looking up from his knees, bottom lip wet, breath short, but not a hair out of place, as if even this were just another job he intended to see through to the best of his ability. There's that look, and the fact that Eames knows himself, and knows he only works at his best when he's right in the middle of the planning – keeping him on the outside makes him mutinous, bored and dangerous. 

"I like Opperman," Eames says. "He's put good work my way when he didn't have to – he's never called bad luck a fuck-up just because he didn't want to pay. So long as it's not him, we're good." 

Arthur tidies his cup and saucer onto his plate and pushes them aside to lean forward. He looks like he wants to demand some sort of blood oath on it first, but he says, 

"All right. Opperman set up the job on Saito. A couple of new mining ventures on the West Coast looked like a front for getting Proclus a foothold in resources, and Opperman wasn't going to let his biggest customer go around him without a fight."

Eames laughed softly. "If you don't want to pay market price for your raw materials, just buy the mines."

"He wasn't the one driving the job, though. One of his section managers had a more specific interest." Arthur pauses as if waiting for Eames to anticipate his direction. "In the DRC."

Everyone gets uneasy at the prospect of a stranger poking around in their subconscious, but Eames remembers one Cobol executive in particular who'd come into the militarisation process like a form of torture, and after subjecting them to a dreamscape full of walls that closed like jaws on them, had shoved da Souza up against the wall and promised to wipe him from the earth if anything went wrong.

"Amundsen." The minute incline of Arthur's head says he's got it right. "What's he running? Diamonds?"

"No. Coltan, is my best guess. Laundered through Rwanda first, then the Cobol books in Kenya."

Eames casts his mind back to skim-read business pages and obscure trading tips gleaned in hotel bars and airport lounges. Since the turn of the millennium, the rise of coltan – or, if he remembered its generic name properly, tantalite – had been as meteoric as the growth in the consumer electronics it was used in. The occasional market shortfall caused by patchy supply chains had driven prices to heady levels that had tempted the greed of some powerful Congolese warlords to even more bloodthirsty extremes than usual. 

"Bit of a long shot, isn't it, waiting for another tantalite bubble? Supply's gone stable – all the big industrial customers have got ten years locked up in forward contracts."

Arthur's undisguised look of surprise is the exact reason Eames charged an extortionate price for his help, and right now wants to jack it up a bit further. It comes from Arthur's bone-deep belief that the key to real knowledge is bestowed in gowned ceremonies in marble columned university halls – as if what Eames has learned through his years of broken bones and hard-won success might be nothing more than low-level animal cunning.

"Don't be so sure," Arthur continues in a hush that barely carries over the breakfast conversation, because when Eames shuffles the numbers as best he can in his head, ten years' supply of a rare mineral indispensible to the manufacture of complex electronics and nuclear components comes to an unthinkable amount of money. "The US military sold off its stockpile four years ago. That leaves the biggest reliable major supply in Western Australia, almost all of it out of one mine."

As the pieces come together, Eames feels the adrenalin arousal of a high-stakes game taking a reckless turn when a player throws down a six-figure sum. He doesn't need to ask who controls the Australian mine, or did until the very recent break-up of the family empire. He doesn't need to ask who would have sabotaged competitors to snap it up. The only unknown is how Saito intends to use his new strangle-hold on tantalite supply. 

Eames's thoughts are only a half-step ahead of his voice. "So when Saito cancels his purchase – all off-book of course, undocumented – Amundsen will be stuck with a few thousand tonnes of tainted minerals-"

"More than that."

"Which he – what? – financed himself, or by skimming out of the company's funds."

"If it's his own money, it's dirty cash. His accounts don't show it."

"And with your fine-toothed-comb reputation, he assumes you worked out what he's doing and sold him out to Saito. Which-" He pauses as if reading the answer in Arthur's unrevealing face, though in truth he's guessing. "- in hindsight you might as well have."

Fischer Morrow's divestment of a few key assets over the last four months may not have rung alarm bells, but Eames can imagine how Saito's acquisition of their tantalite mine must have set Amundsen on a desperate mission to wipe out the evidence of his off-book operations before his bosses at Cobol caught him, find a new buyer for his stock, and punish Arthur's presumed double-dealing. Cobol plays fast and loose with the law in any country that fails to regulate it down to the last paper clip. Amundsen, if he's found out, will have nothing left to lose. No wonder he's circulated whatever lies it took to convince his bosses to let him take out a hit on Arthur and Cobb. 

Arthur taps the schematic. "Where do I find him?" 

Eames tells him most of what he knows, because he doesn't back out of a done deal either. It's too late to raise his price, too late to remember his dad saying that the Koh-i Noor is worth the same as an acorn in the hands of a dead man. He's got two choices, and for now the best one is to see it through and bank on Arthur's success. 

**

He spends a frustrating few hours shifting from internet cafes to hotel lobbies in a futile effort to re-open his back door into the Cobol system. The personnel records are blocked entirely, and by mid-afternoon he can't even get back to the plans he pulled down at breakfast. Either Hamid has been replaced by someone with the diligence to sort out Eames's convincing proxies from among the legitimate traffic, or whatever's going on in Kenya is scarier than the prospect of Hamid's employers finding out that he dodged their militarisation directive and has been compromising security for the eighteen months since. 

He goes back to his own hotel long enough to change his clothes and endure a sly dressing down from Frank about his protracted absences – as if spending all afternoon bitterly rehashing the Macau fuck-up over weak beers in Miriam's hotel room could turn up a new explanation more palatable than outdated intel, awful luck and a local operative with an itchy trigger finger. 

"We're one man down already," Frank says in a typically jovial reprimand, thinking no doubt of Eames's dad, who'd nutted out the plan while on bail for the fencing charges no-one ever expected to stick, and would have dissected the outcome in the most loving detail Frank could have wished, if he'd only been free to see his labours come to fruition.

Eames shakes his head. "Working with young persons, what were you thinking, Francis? When we're not up to our elbows in internet pornography, we're stumbling about in nightclubs putting love drugs up our noses." He cheerfully picks up his jacket and glasses. "Speaking of which, I have places to be."

In the afternoon, he knocks at Arthur's hotel room only to find that his services aren't required because the books on zinc ore processing he ordered have been delayed by a day. 

He lasts the best part of an hour jotting down all the details he can remember of the daily operations at the Kisumu plant in the sort of tabulated and alphabetised format that will make them real to Arthur. Just when his focus is wavering, the gaps in his memory starting to drive him up the wall, Arthur bends down to plug his laptop in for a recharge.

The nimble sideways flex of his waist and the glimpse of bare skin beneath a patch of untucked shirt wield a steamy power in the professional setting, an abrupt erotic shock. The blood runs hotter in his veins. He feels wronged to find last night's naked flesh placed beyond his reach.

"Let's take a break," he suggests pointedly. "It's a couple of hours before I can call my man at the plant again."

Arthur's pages scroll rapidly upwards as if Eames hadn't spoken. Standing, Eames splays his hand out over the back of Arthur's screen, pinning it to the desk. He leans down, bracketing Arthur with both arms from behind, to say close to his ear,

"Come on. Help me clear my mind."

Arthur clasps his now unoccupied hands calmly in his lap and goes dead still.

"Maybe this will help clear your mind. A little over fifty percent of the inmates at Rebbibia have an addiction. Heroin mostly." Eames gives a scoffing laugh, to cover the shiver that constricts his throat. "There's nothing an addict won't do to get what he needs. Physical necessity, you know. I hear your father's got seven months non-parole left."

It's a few days short of eight, unless the application to repatriate him to France finally comes through, but Eames doesn't say that. He mulls it over while he goes back to sketching out the distribution of staff during day shift in the main furnace at Kisumu. That part of the plant, the oldest part which formed the nucleus of British Eastern Orefields' original colonial fortune in zinc and precious metals before the merger with Cobol, has been patched up and retrofitted so many times that its layout looks like the brainchild of a long-term drunk. The pen digs a trench in the paper as he outlines the security points.

"You set all the terms," Arthur says, maybe a half a degree warmer, when Eames has completed the office compound and the two satellite furnaces as well. "Stick to them and you've got nothing to worry about." 

**

His intention of making Arthur pay for his coolly implied threat comes to nothing, in the end. After a day of paperwork and a frosty reminder from Miriam about his lack of progress on the dragon vase, he's looking forward too keenly to the simple physical relief to complicate it with any sort of brutally delivered lesson. 

"Did you get through to your man at the plant?" Arthur asks that same evening, coming back from the bathroom with a towel around his hips, probably scrubbed clean of all evidence that Eames ever touched him.

He is far more resilient than his well-heeled bearing suggests, Eames has to give him that. Without any sign of damage, he goes on meeting Eames's touch with a level of implacable self-control far greater than he could ever manage during their clashes over trivial details of strategy. 

Eames gives a leisurely stretch. "Yeah, he's on board." 

It has been years, for Eames, since sex was a mere matter of reaching out for someone. Normally there is at least a phone call, as little small talk as he can get away with, a drive back across town afterwards. He lies back in the rumpled sheets with the last beer from the bar fridge in hand, idly contemplating what he'd like to do next. 

"Hard to get hold of though," he goes on, conversation coming easily. "His phone is company issue – I can only get him at his sister's diner on the other side of town."

Arthur pulls on a t-shirt over the towel and shifts the brochures off the desk to open his skinny silver laptop. It starts up almost instantly. Eames can't tell what he's scrolling through, but the Cobol logo is all over it, and a fuzzy watermark that looks about the right length for "confidential".

"Sounds like the place is a bit of a powder keg at the moment."

The rapid scrolling of Arthur's screen halts. "Yes? How?"

He waits for Arthur to do him the courtesy of swivelling round to face him.

"Staffing." Eames presses his shoulder-blades against the headboard, stretching them out, takes all the time in the world. "They've got men pouring in from the north as well as the west now. The locals are already up in arms about the number of Congolese on the payroll – now they're getting replaced by hungry men trickling down from Somalia and South Sudan. Same old story. Wages go through the floor, management skimps on training, accidents start to happen."

Arthur whips back around to his keyboard. "Go on."

Eames watches him work, flipping from browser to spreadsheet with rapid, regular finger taps. 

"Eames?"

The windows multiply like some sort of information mitosis before his eyes: a search engine so plain it must be military testing, a succession of newspaper sites, something with the UN wreath in the corner. When he was a kid, he watched with the same fascination, breath held, as his dad levered the cover off a security panel and cut the alarm with a twist of pliers before it could make a sound.

"It's all speculative," Eames continues eventually. "Sometimes it's a genuine accident. The lead and zinc plant is a hundred-year-old piece of shit – all the big money goes on new equipment for the high value minerals they bring in from Rwanda or Congo. And other times ... well, word is it's not so accidental. The only question is whether it's sabotage by workers with an agenda, or management getting rid of trouble-makers."

Cell by cell, the spreadsheet is filling up with data. It produces a weird, voyeuristic thrill, watching Arthur's research taking shape, like the first time witnessing a woman putting on her make-up. He doesn't seem to have noticed that Eames has finished talking. 

Eames rolls out of bed without getting dressed. From up close, the spreadsheet shows a growing list of safety incidents, spanning the last decade, across each of Cobol's African ops. Arthur tenses at the touch of Eames's hand on his shoulder, tucking into the neck of his shirt.

"Twenty minutes," he says testily. "Can I have that? I need to make a call."

His typing slows down as it becomes apparent that Eames is not going to move, or withdraw his hand from where it's feeling up the lean muscle over Arthur's shoulder. Finally he abandons the keys entirely and draws one of those deep breaths by means of which he seems to preserve his toe-hold in civility. Eames leans over him to crook one finger behind the screen and pull it closed. 

"Get back on the bed then," Arthur says as he stands, sucking his bottom lip then the top into his mouth to wet them. The instruction is perfectly neutral: no resentment, no attitude.

Eames says, "You really have no acquaintance with imagination. You think that's all I like, do you?"

The snort Arthur lets out is so laden with derision that Eames decides to switch it around for once, just to see the look on his face. 

**

He's a dreadful sleeper, restless enough to throw Eames, who has adapted since adolescence to irregular kips in whatever spare moments the job gave him, off his stride. Whether he dreams or not, it's clear that his mind is not quiet. The fourth or fifth time Eames feels the body next to him kick from one side back to the other, settling irritably, he gives up and opens his eyes. 

Arthur is rubbing at the inside of his left forearm, worrying the old puncture marks with nails that are too well clipped to do damage. His breathing is not restful. The angles of his face look a bit haggard in sleep, unattractive without the intense focus of his waking attention. 

All Eames has to do is reach out. In a couple of minutes, with his hands around Arthur's throat, he could make the easiest million of his life. Get Cobol back on side. One way of looking at it, Arthur's a dead man already, and the only variable is who pockets the profit when he goes.

He takes Arthur's wrist and presses his hand flat against the sheets until his fingers go still. Money is meaningless, except as a measure of the skill it took to acquire. Grandmother Margot used to say, most likely implying an unwarranted slur on Frank's second wife, that the kind of people who yearned for it were like dogs after a messy dig: oblivious to the crumbs of dirt that everyone else could see clinging around their mouths.

"Arthur," he snaps, to wake him out of whatever source of worry is occupying him and get him onto a quieter plane of consciousness. "Stop your bloody fidgeting before I finish you off."

Arthur frowns like he's about to wake, he breathes out an angry breath the way he might say "Because it's a hundred miles off the plan, Eames", then at last he settles. Luckily Eames falls asleep without letting go, because he has to repeat the process twice more to make it to morning. 

**

"Take your time," Arthur says, implying the opposite, the moment Eames arrives at breakfast, and that is so far over the line that Eames just gives him an over-bright "Cheers" and goes through the buffet tables and the omelette counter with forensic precision before he returns to Arthur's corner.

Dressed once again like a tourist, in a loose tropical print buttoned shirt that obscures the efficient lines of his torso, and a book open on the table by his glass, he very nearly looks relaxed as Eames puts down his plate. Then he turns the book around and it's heavily marked with his little felt-tipped capitals.

"Which model is B Furnace at Kisumu?"

The page, which from the layout appears to be about the same elderly vintage as the Kisumu plant itself, shows three different diagrams of blast furnaces. He tries to marry them up with the gargantuan facade of steaming hot metal he remembers from his one or two visits inside. 

"That one." He gestures with the corner of his toast to figure II. "But the funnel is wider and square at the top."

The glint in Arthur's eye tells him that Arthur is familiar with the correct technical term, and it's not "funnel". "You've been reading up, have you?" 

"Not really," Arthur says dismissively, as if the fundamentals of metal extraction were assumed general knowledge. "I'll have some more recent texts this afternoon you'll need to look at. Don't go far."

Turning the page, Arthur draws two neat exclamation marks next to a paragraph about the properties of coal, underneath a series of incomprehensible equations, as if he would like to give the long-deceased author a piece of his mind. There is something about Arthur's systematic approach to problem solving that has long made Eames suspect that at least one of his closely guarded qualifications is in engineering – chemical or mechanical. 

"I've got a cousin who does electrics at a wrecking yard," Eames offers innocently. "If any of this is over your head." 

Arthur gives that the look it deserves. But he adds a moment later, "Lazy, wasteful thinking," scowl deepening but sounding a little pleased. "The Victorians had the concept of cogeneration worked out, then we spent a hundred years going backwards."

"Excuse me, sir."

Arthur is already reaching for the unsealed A4 envelope which the reception clerk hands to him. Eames gets a glimpse of the Wall Street Journal masthead as Arthur pulls out the two faxed pages inside it. _Belgian giant faces new UN probe,_ reads the headline when Arthur passes it to him. The article's twelve paragraphs rehash the long-running investigation by the US Department of Justice into breaches of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which until now has made little progress in the face of Cobol's creative and lavishly funded obstruction. There are calls now for the DoJ's mandate to be expanded to include the high rate of fatalities across Cobol's African ops. The new information is instantly familiar to Eames. Fifty two deaths in six months, including incidents among Cobol's tangled web of subsidiaries and front companies. The US envoy has today indicated her support for expanding the investigation. The anonymous sign-off reads _Tomorrow, leading Business._

Eight hours ago, Arthur was pulling the genesis of his data together. It isn't terribly surprising that he has got his fingers on some impressive strings to pull. He has privilege in his bones. Whatever marble-halled institutions schooled him must have introduced him to future power-brokers, and if his contemporaries aren't yet old enough to be editors-in-chief or heads of department, the brightest and hungriest of them will be next rung down by now, managing day to day business for their complacent middle-aged superiors. The only place he seems to lack influence is in the particular section of Cobol that wants to erase him.

"Taking the safety angle makes you the enemy, you know," Eames says. "You'll have security stuck to you from the moment you walk through the gate at Kisumu – say goodbye to the idea of walking around unsupervised."

Arthur does not appear troubled. 

"I'm not the enemy if I've been paid off by head office to make my report a whitewash."

Slowly, Eames puts down his fork.

The strategies for pulling off Arthur's ambitious plan are still rearranging themselves in Eames's mind half an hour later as he returns to his hotel, shifting in a kaleidoscope of possibilities. He gets off on the planning of a job almost as much as the execution, his mind shuffling through ideas at maximum speed without the reckless pressure of time running out. There will be intel to get from Brussels on the timeframe for instituting the inevitable safety audits across the African ops, and miscommunications to arrange between head office, Nairobi and Kisumu – Eames has the contacts to pull off all of that. There will be security codes to filch, distractions to arrange, and all sorts of papers to mock up for Arthur's health and safety persona. He has the best part of two days left here, 24 hours' transit through Heathrow, at least a day to get over the border from Sudan, and as little time as possible on the ground – in and out before someone twigs Cobol to the presence of two more foreigners in the city.

With a bit of luck, some furious ad-libbing, and single-minded concentration, the plan is just on the fringes of possibility. Which is exactly where Eames works at his best.

Miriam doesn't bother with any of the obvious observations about his long absence when he knocks on her door to tell her there's been a change of plans regarding the dragon vase. The vase is sitting on the floor at the end of her bed, along with matching bowl and plate she must have knocked out last night, finishing his share of the work. In the natural light from the open window, Eames can only just distinguish the gloss of the fakes from the time-worn originals, but under the fluorescents of customs, they will pass for an innocuous, modern factory-made set. He couldn't have done a better job himself. 

"Charlie's flying into Sofia tomorrow," she tells him. "If you want to do the hand-over in Heathrow you'll have to get Alex to meet you. Or move it closer to home so that Julie can pick it up. You sort it. If you can't get it home, it's coming out of your cut."

She sits on the bed and goes back to touching up the peach-coloured polish on her toenails, with the leisurely air of a woman with her tasks accomplished ahead of time.

"Every man for himself now, is it?"

Her brush strokes pause briefly. "That's what you get for shirking."

He knows better than to rise to that, since the payment for the antiques will come in through her hands. 

He just adds, "Thought I did my bit getting us out the plant room window." He touches the stitches through his shirt, the ones that she put in herself, fighting the lurching of the boat. "Without that, we'd be quibbling about our share of nothing in some basement cell in Beijing with a bucket in the corner."

She switches feet, continuing to fill in chips and gaps with the same tiny dabs of colour that would have been repeated a thousand times over to finish off the replica ceramics. The angle of her neck is stiff. "Give the man the fucking legion of honour."

The door is almost shut when she throws in one last quiet shot. "Don't trust him and don't fuck him, I was told."

He should let it go. Perhaps it's the knowledge that he has, in fact, been shirking, that makes him lean back into the room.

"Contract work." He articulates each syllable, too weary of the whole thing to bother with sentences. "Arm's length. No strings. I'll be home in a week – just watch me."

She screws the lid back on the polish tightly and gives him the sceptical look that started all too many fights when they were kids.

**

The meeting at the club has been switched twice, and the aunt is absent when they arrive. Half the lights are off this time, making the place feel gloomy even after the rain outside. The table the brothers have chosen puts Eames and Frank with their back to the door, so Eames moves over to inspect a photograph on the wall, a young lady with an inviting smile and a flower behind her ear, from simpler days before the war. 

"Now lads," Frank says before they can start with the drinks or the girls. "I've got a man in Marseille wants to talk to you. He's keen to get into business with some high level players over here. But my word's not good enough. Says he wants to know who he's dealing with."

The brothers share a look that Eames finds harder than ever to decipher.

Eames says, "Cards on the table. Give us someone you've worked with. A big game international player, a name that shows our mate in Marseille what you're made of."

The older brother says a few quiet words in their own tongue. It's early afternoon and they are stone cold sober this time, still and watchful with their swagger turned right down, and for the first time Eames has the feeling that he and Frank are the ones being measured.

Frank must have clocked the change too, because he doesn't press for the name of their army contact like they'd planned he would.

"First you do something for us," the younger brother says, leaning back in his chair. "Show faith."

The other brother watches them closely as he goes on. "You get some guy for us. You take him out."

"Sure," says Eames. "Who?"

He slides his hands into his pockets, slouching against the wall, to contain the urge to smash both of their faces into the tabletop. A week ago, they lifted a laptop full of military-grade briefing documents from the second in command of Beijing's European and US surveillance team and sweetened the job with a half-million dollars worth of antiques. 

"His house in Dong Da. You go at night."

"Any particular way you'd like it done? Knife as good as a bullet?"

"Jimmy-" Frank cautions him quietly. "Leave it."

On the walk over here, he'd been mulling over an ambitious alternative plan for convincing a violently defensive global resources giant to grease the palms of an uncredentialed alias for a favourable safety report. Now he's being commissioned for a crime he could pull off with half a house brick. 

"Who's the target?" Frank attempts to get the negotiation back a more fruitful track.

"A man who work here once. He start his own business." 

"You're kidding me," Eames scoffs. "Only one man and not even a general?"

There's a chilling sort of silence after that. Eames keeps perfectly still against the wall. Both brothers have got one hand under the table, firearms in reach. 

"We'll think it over," Frank promises, because it would be pretty fucking stupid to get themselves shot by a couple of small-time pimps after the job they've just pulled off and the new one on Eames's horizon. "Let you know our price first thing tomorrow."

The older one puts his hand back on the table and gives a curt nod.

"Bit gloomy, this place," Frank says as they're at the door. "How about somewhere more cheerful tomorrow? That temple in the big garden – what's the name of that?"

"The one on the island?" Eames plays along as the brothers murmur objections to each other.

"Nah, further out. South."

"High wall around it?"

"Got it."

"Temple of Literature."

Franks nods an amicable farewell as he pulls the door closed. "Nine o'clock, lads. Temple of Literature. Don't be late."

They weave their way back to the bridge through backstreets, in case their would-be associates try to catch them up to switch the venue back to their home turf. 

"I suppose I'll be distracting the two of them while you have one last go at the aunt."

Frank gives him a sidelong grin. "That's my boy."

"There's a price on it," Eames tells him. "If she comes through with the name we need, put her onto someone else. One of Freddy's bottom-feeder mates. I don't want us mixed up with their sort of business."

Frank gives his usual murmur, full of affirmative reassurance and yet lacking any explicit consent that could pin him down inconveniently in the future. 

Eames learned years ago how to counter that particular tactic. "Was that 'Yes, Jim, I promise to cut us loose from these second-rate pretenders'?"

He stops half-way over the bridge and makes a show of watching the islands of lily pads drifting on its brown surface, until he gets the answer he wants.

It's only as they're parting ways, back on the other side, that Frank adds with casual cheer, "I suppose I'd better meet your fugitive friend then. If we're making committee decisions about who the family gets into bed with. So to speak."

"Let's do that." Eames throws over his shoulder as he turns south along the riverbank towards Arthur's hotel. "Definitely."

From two blocks away, he sees the first danger signs. He doesn't need to understand the language to see how passers-by are talking to shopkeepers with a subtle note of urgency. Closer still and he starts to pass the tourists heading in the opposite direction. _Sounded like handguns to me,_ a German man tells his wife. Further on, two women sound shaken as they agree _In a place like that – it's not as if they can't afford security._

Eames pulls the tattered map out of his back pocket for cover and slows his pace as he turns the corner. Over the map's top edge, he sees emergency vehicles jammed onto the pavement outside the Metropole, uniformed police and military talking into phones and, occasionally, to each other. The onlookers crowding the other side of the street are all tourists; the locals are going back to work. The only external sign of damage is a spray of glass on the street from where a window on the second storey has been blown from the inside. If it's not Arthur's room, it's the one next door. 

The unhurried stance of the authorities tells him that the perpetrators have already been apprehended, or killed.

"Gunshots, huh?" he prompts a tourist with his sunglasses tucked in his t-shirt neck typing something long and fast into his phone browser.

"I heard it," the man tells him, glancing up. "Al Qaeda, has to be. Only two of them, though. Seems off."

"Not locals, then?"

The man glares irritably at his screen and lifts up the device to snap a photograph of the blown out window. "Could be. The stretchers were covered up."

Arthur could be dead in the back of an ambulance, the blood among the hibiscuses on his shirt already turned dark and cold. He could be in custody. Walking back towards his own hotel, Eames wonders whether he should call Cobb. Rumour has it that Cobb is in Arthur's debt for more than one ill-advised job which Arthur followed him into over objections that proved to be fairly well founded. Perhaps they made an arrangement for a contingency like this. Even if he's too protective of his hard won quiet life to tap them very often, Cobb has high-up contacts stopping just short, Eames has heard, of the door of the Oval Office. It would be entirely fucking satisfying to make that complacent son of a bitch use them for Arthur's sake.

He stops in a cafe with an international phone booth to put in another call to Emmanuel, his contact on the ground in Kisumu, to find out from the sister that he isn't in yet. Worst case, even if Arthur is gone for good, Eames is tempted to finish the job off anyway. Cobol, as it swallows up rival companies and all their moral compromises along with them, has squandered his initial good opinion by turning to brute force more often than brilliant criminal inspiration. Amundsen needs to learn that he can't pick off an extraction team without consequences. And after all, Arthur has already paid the major part of his fee in a currency that can't be refunded now. 

He passes Miriam lounging in a wicker chair in the cramped reception area with a copy of The Netherlands edition of Lonely Planet.

"Lost something?" she asks. 

He remembers the map he had never got around to putting away and stuffs it into his back pocket as he continues towards the stairs. "All good."

He finds himself bullishly determined to stifle any discussions that might lead to the probable failure of his new job, or to Arthur. 

"Jim." He pauses half way up the first flight. "Check my window's closed, would you. It feels like rain."

He snatches the key as she chucks it. Heat, humidity and time have warped the door in its frame. Eames rattles it hard to get the teeth lined up and turning. The window is open. Miriam's suitcase is neatly squared beneath it. Arthur is sitting on the bed, leaning back against the wall.

"Plan's come forward," Arthur tells him without preamble. "We're getting out of the country today."

Apart from the tight bandage swathing his right hand and wrist and something subtly delicate about the way he's holding his right leg, there are no visible injuries on him. Eames has a swift urge to make some.

"This is stupid even for an amateur." Arthur must be more shaken than he first looked, because he doesn't manage to hide how hard that hits him. "I'm on a fucking job here. Don't bring your fuck-ups anywhere near us."

The room contains a handsomely valued antique and about twenty dollars worth of recently painted fakes, and there's no way that Arthur hasn't by now pieced together most of the steps that led from Macau to here.

"I was careful, Eames."

"Yeah? Two dead men and a bullet hole in the facade of the Metropole say not careful enough."

"All right, okay," Arthur says, and Eames hates the way the appearance of surrender placates him even though he knows it's just a new tone Arthur has learned to wield as a practical necessity for getting the help he needs Eames to give him. "The alias I used for those books, I thought I could trust everyone knew it. You're right, it was a bad call, but it's taken care of."

He's got pretty familiar of late with the flinty expression Arthur puts on when he wants to cover a more vulnerable reaction. It makes him wonder, now, whether Arthur hasn't had to kill much before, or has never quite got used to it, or imagines this blank dismissal is how it's done in Eames's trade.

"I took care of it. And it's not as if you've given me a lot of other ways to get in touch with you."

It surprises him to realise that no, all Arthur has is the name of this hotel, which Eames never volunteered, and his old, sporadically checked dreamshare email. If they've synched up the last few days without the need for text or phone, it's only by virtue of second-guessing each other's routines. He taps the lip of the bowl with the edge of his fingernail to give himself a moment. As expected, the paint is too hard now to dent.

"Who were they?" 

Arthur shrugs. "European. Twenties. I didn't know them and I wasn't about to waste time finding out when they were both still armed and crawling."

In dreams, he approves of Arthur's level-headed focus under attack. Always the first with his weapon drawn or his shoulder to the door, he is the quintessential point man, but Eames wonders how much of that carries through in the waking world. Does too much adrenalin leave him shaking? Can he still be stoical about a seeping wound when the blood is real?

"Only the two of them?"

"If there'd been a third he'd have taken a shot at me on the way out. I wasn't moving all that fast." He follows Eames's gaze to his gingerly held leg. "It only grazed me. I can walk straight enough not to look suspicious. My flight leaves at eight thirty."

He picks up one of his dearly bought books but doesn't open it, waiting for Eames's response. The flights are easy enough to change. What's harder to put right is the knowledge that when you open up one term for re-negotiation, the whole agreement ends up back on the table. 

"The deal was Saturday. You're presuming far too bloody much."

"I know," Arthur says plainly, like a man whose sole remaining option is to go on presuming as much as he can, for as long as he can get away with. "Call me a cab right now if I'm putting your job at risk. Or tell me how you want me to make it up to you."

**

"It's a reckless fucking idea, Eames," Arthur tells him unhelpfully as he's getting into the taxi an hour later. "They'll hand either one of us over – no arguments, no right of appeal."

"Only if they get a tip-off," Eames replies, leaning on the roof above the open door and keeping it low enough not to carry over the engine's noise. "Which they won't. So long as the paperwork's in order and we don't break the law right under their noses, they'll leave us alone."

Because Arthur looks as if he'd like to argue, Eames goes on softly, "And it's one place you can be sure they won't be selling passenger lists to the highest bidder. You'll be off the CIA's radar, off Cobol's. Changi's the best bolt-hole in the Asia Pacific - it's saved my arse enough times I should know."

"Trust me," he catches himself adding, in the smug way that sometimes brings Miriam round despite herself. 

He'd take it back if he could: this is a professional job, arm's length, no matter how his terms may have muddied the waters. Professionals deal in confidence, which is a measure of reputation and objectively proven skill. Trust is altogether too personal a commodity.

Arthur just says, "Shut the door, Mr Eames. I'll see you tomorrow."

The taxi eases off down the street. Eames commits the numberplate to memory for reasons he can't quite explain to himself. 

**

In the end, he strings their strip club mogul wannabe partners along for twenty highly irritable minutes while they all feign interest in the checkerboard layout of ponds and low hedges that form the antechamber to the Temple of Literature. The brothers have an insatiable curiosity for the far-fetched fringes of Western military technology. From a job his dad led on a banker with Mossad connections – the most meticulously researched of his long career – Eames knows marginally more than they do, which is more than enough for his present purposes, namely keeping them distracted while Frank deals with their more business minded aunt, swapping an introduction to his European network for the name of an army contact who can get them a foothold in Hanoi's underworld. 

"Couldn't pull a sailor off your sister," Eames scoffs about a Chinese manufactured tank he heard of once at a gatecrashed black tie function in Geneva. "The Russians are the alpha of terrestrial mechanics, and the fucking omega, always have been." 

The elder brother glances pointedly at the entrance which Frank still has not come through. "Hang on a minute, I'll see where he's up to," he says.

He pulls out his phone to find the expected text from Frank. _Got it. Fuck off south, kid._

"Missed call," Eames tells them, and pressing the phone to his ear as if battling shoddy reception, he wanders away from them, ad libbing a rejected credit card and an irate hotel manager. When he's near enough to the exit, he skips through it, still talking, and straight into the passenger seat of the waiting taxi. 

_And watch your back,_ comes Frank's after-thought en route to the airport. As if Eames might forget that his family's only African connections are Frank's multitude of in-laws-twice-removed in Algeria; as if he didn't know he was wholly exposed if something should go wrong on the other side of the Equator. As if Eames hadn't been in and out of the lion's jaw of Cobol's Kenyan ops a dozen times before.

He replies _My cut of the crockery says I'm home before month end,_ breaks the sim card in two and leaves the handset wedged down the side of the seat. 

**

Notwithstanding some unwelcome stares from four passing armed guards – sharp enough to have Eames scanning the walls for emergency doors he could lunge for if it came to desperate measures – he makes the rendezvous in Changi comfortably. He finds Arthur outside the Hard Rock Cafe chatting with three German backpackers. They are scrolling through photographs of Angkor Wat on a tablet when Eames sits down a couple of tables over and waits for Arthur's full attention.

"If that's supposed to be a fertility symbol," the young man in lightweight hiking polythermals that look semi-professional is saying, tapping the screen with a neat fingernail, "there's something wrong with the men I've been meeting."

Arthur grins the particular grin that wipes five years and every law he's broken completely off his face. "They don't make them built like they used to, huh?"

Eames slips away to lift a couple of passports from a holidaying football team from Queensland which has turned the pool area into its own noisy private spa. After checking both of them into the airport hotel, he returns the passports before anything is missed.

Arthur is not the disaster Eames expected at close quarters. In the tiny room, designed for the bare transit essentials of washing, sleeping and email, he seems to draw in on himself, his bag wedged right up against the foot of his bed, on top of the PASIV case; the spread of his books and papers contained behind invisible walls. He uses unfamiliar expressions like "Would you like" and "Do you mind" before using the television or the kettle, and otherwise doesn't talk. He leaves the closet sized bathroom drier, if possible, than before he turned on the shower. 

It's Eames who finds himself restless. Waking sometime after four, he watches the digital minutes on the clock tick over. With his bandaged hand curled on the pillow beside him, Arthur doesn't stir, probably succumbing at last to the accumulated effects of stress, injuries and last night spent kipping in the darkest corner of the terminal he could find. 

Eames lets himself out to walk the length of the building, past seats full of jetlagged passengers draped uncomfortably across arm-rests under the lowered lights. He browses a few news sites on the free internet terminals to find that Arthur's planted health and safety story is gaining momentum, having migrated from the business section to the lower reaches of the main news. The Independent has picked it up in what he hopes will be its usual pythonic liberal grip. 

The sun is up, by a whisker, when he gets back. He wakes Arthur as gently as he can, to bypass any argument on the point of day versus night, mouthing his way from Arthur's throat down his sleep-warm chest. Arthur's hand settles around the back of his head, directing him gently as if his half-awake body has forgotten the trade they made and imagines they're doing this for real. Eames ignores the tightening of fingers that tells him to hurry up. This is the last comfortable bed he's going to see for a while, and Arthur's side of the deal ends here, today. The last thing he intends to do is finish this quickly. 

It takes some convincing to pull Arthur back to his lazy speed, but at this hour Eames is better at reading physical reactions than Arthur is at hiding them. As he already knows, Arthur is no more immune to the determined attention of Eames's mouth than any other human being, and with his fingers deep in Arthur's body, he can feel the exact pattern of his pleasure building and receding again. He's virtually boneless by the time Eames has worked him up, easy as butter and speechless, hand skimming from Eames's shoulder over his neck and cheek, eyes fluttering open with a lost sort of look every time the rhythm changes. Eames wonders how many days he could keep him like that, if they were two ordinary people and not the men they are. 

"All right, enough," Arthur says afterwards, pushing Eames away from his neck and breaking the languid mood of the attentive, drawn-out hand job he'd reciprocated with. He sounds hard done by, as if Eames couldn't read the satiated lull of his heartbeat and the flush of his chest under the rucked up t-shirt. The bedside clock reads 7:15.

"Listen." Watching the faint pulse in Arthur's temple, Eames casts his mind back to the possibilities that his late-night wandering thoughts had thrown up. "There's other ways to go about it. I can find someone to take care of Amundsen. Clean and simple, you don't-"

Wielding the point of his elbow to clear the way, Arthur rolls out from under him and off the bed. "Don't waste your breath. I'd kill him myself if I thought that would fix it. This is the only way that works."

He leaves Eames with an entirely awake looking scowl as he closes the bathroom door.

They have separate flights, taking different routes to South Sudan, that evening. Arthur spends all day completing his metamorphosis into the industrial safety expert he will need to be in a week's time, frowning at the laptop that he insists over Eames's objections is secure enough to use. Eames puts in another call to Emmanuel at his sister's diner and nails down the last details of their on-the-ground movements. They put their business faces back on and do what they're best at.

**


	3. See, hear, smell, touch taste

"The money must be good," Alex says to him when they meet in International Transit at Frankfurt. "Look at it gleaming in your eyes."

 He grins meaningfully, and Eames puts his sunglasses on to bring an end to that line of discussion.

 He nudges the bag with the dragon vase and its matching fakes towards Alex's chair. "Have you got your cover together?"

 "My what?"

 "Jesus-" Normally he knows better than to react when Alex plays up to his reputation as the ingénue among thieves.

Alex sighs. "I bought it in a market in Istanbul in summer. A gift for my darling sister who I'm visiting in Marseille. Of course I didn't keep a receipt for a hundred lira set of jars. Do you have any idea what a software engineer makes in Geneva?"

 With the same generous mouth as Eames and his father, and his big, dark-lashed eyes, Alex looks and sounds like an upper middle class business graduate, rather than the apprentice con-man that he is. But Grandmother Margot is waiting to see whether his early success in low-scale securities fraud has left him over-confident before she lets him stick his neck any further out. The dragon vase is a chance to measure his competence on a simple, high-stakes task.

"Charlie could use another man on his Bulgarian job," Alex says casually when Eames reaches for the bag of trade tools hanging off the back of his chair. "Unless you'd rather I came with you."

Since he fell in with an ambassador's son with an interest in hunting and made the acquaintance of high powered rifles, Alex has been more than usually keen to join the more dangerous ventures. Eames has an awful vision of what Alex and Arthur would be like working together: all precise, inflexible strategising, and borderline pornographic talk about compound probability, and the sort of flirtatious, softly spoken mentoring he watched Arthur bestow on Ariadne throughout the Fischer job to no apparent gratitude.

"It's a low-rent industrial break-in. You'd be bored before I finished talking you through the prep work," Eames lies. "Wrap this one up neatly and we'll see about next time."

The thing about a well-spoken kid like Alex is that people tell him things, and he listens. "If it wasn't good money that made you blow off Miriam and Charlie's jobs, then what was it?"

Sometimes working with family is a permanently stretched safety net; other times it's more like an inescapable noose. Eames stands up and knocks Alex's chin with his knuckles into a position where he can scrutinise his pupils.

"Is that the remains of last night's Special K, Alexandre?" he enquires politely. "Hardly what your grandmother would expect on a job like this. Or would you say that's none of my fucking business?"

**

He calls Opperman from his stopover in Cairo, while the final call for his flight is flashing urgently on screen. It's ungodly early, but then their kind of dealings have always taken place strictly outside office hours.

"I heard they've got you under the hammer on plant safety."

There is what sounds like something being tapped against a metal sink as Opperman replies distractedly, "Yes?"

"A special rapporteur on the job, no less."

"In thirty seconds, I'll be grinding my coffee."

Eames has a moment of regret. Once this thing is done, he won't be able to work for Opperman again, because he'll never know for sure whether their con has been uncovered and, while he may cultivate the persona of a genteel man of business, Opperman can wipe a man out with a word.

"I've got a bloke on the ground in Juba - comes with good references from a contact in the Home Office. Yale fellow, ex KBR, contracted to the Department of Defense, the utmost in integrity. Very professional gentleman and exceptionally well qualified to sort out this mess and give you the answers you need."

Eames doesn't let the clink of a cup being taken from a cupboard throw him off.

"I can get him to you by the end of the week. His payment comes through my Swiss account, I'll sort out my own commission."

Beans, or something similar sounding, rattle as they are poured. Twenty one, twenty two. Eames smiles to himself, enjoying the showmanship of negotiation, waiting until the last moment before Opperman flicks the switch, refusing to rush his proposal even with a man whose time is worth a grand an hour.

"And?" Opperman prompts at twenty nine and a half.

"I see myself working closer to home from now on. I've had it up to here with salt beef and bad water pressure and never being the tallest guy in the room. I've earned some comfortable contracts in Europe."

"Excellent," replies Opperman, sounding now as if he might be beaming at his coffee maker. "First-class work as always. Send me the details, won't you?"

Eames files those phrases away, and the tone that goes with them, in his bank of useful traits for forgeries. It's Opperman's own special magic that despite everything he knows, right in the middle of a double-cross, Eames has a vision of working for him legitimately, handing him the pilfered confidential report that will clinch the deadlocked negotiation; leaning back expansively in the visitor's chair for an annual review that will be more like a bar-room chat.

"You enjoy that coffee now."

The call ends in the whizz of the grinder.

**

To give him the credit he deserves, throughout the interminable overland ride from Juba, Arthur doesn't once question the decision to come into Kenya over the South Sudanese border. They both know that Cobol has the airports and the south and west entry points under close surveillance, keeping a good many of the border guards in their pay to protect their mining interests in Uganda and Rwanda and their prospects in Tanzania. The tide of human misery crossing southwards from Ethiopia and the Sudan holds far less interest for them.

With his reclaimed baseball cap pulled low, dark glasses and a few days' growth shading his jaw, Arthur manages not to stand out like a patrician sore thumb on the mini-bus that drops them off at the border crossing. He keeps his seat with his legs drawn up on top of his bag and watches quietly through the open window. But he's winding himself up like a spring with every mile that brings them closer to Cobol's heartland. He jolts when Eames touches his elbow to make him take a new bottle of water.

The border checkpoint is so thoroughly closed by the time they get there that even Eames's wad of greenbacks can't prise it open. They backtrack a kilometre through the dry heat and fading light to the ramshackle camp comprised of aging charity tents, buildings improvised from canvas and crates, and a single UN truck. Since the tents are already overflowing with bodies sleeping on the nearest unoccupied patch of ground they can find, Eames tracks down a spot behind the lean-to that houses the camp kitchens where they at least have the cover of a wall to put their backs against.

Arthur accepts the plastic cup of lukewarm soup Eames brings him, only to take a few disinterested sips and put it on the ground beside the bag he's sitting on. The people Eames knew when he first came through here – twenty two years old and invincible, striking out for territory that was all his own – have long since moved on. In the dark, he walks a few more times around the periphery of the camp, clocking the movements of those men without families whom he judges most likely to be in Cobol's pay. Then he returns to the spot from which Arthur has not moved and curls up to sleep. If they leave at first light, they might catch the medical team en route to Nairobi who the MSF nurse told him crossed the border that morning, to give them a cover of legitimacy.

It isn't any movement that wakes him, in the cool hours of late night when the evening's fires are well and truly burnt out, but an absence.

The camp lights have gone out, leaving only two patches of torchlight in the administrative buildings. From the sliver of moon, he can make out Arthur's travel bag with the PASIV in it slumped on the ground, its handles looped around the shoulder strap of Eames's own. Arthur is nowhere to be seen. He shifts the ex-army Beretta 92 he picked up on the street in Juba into his pocket and shoulders the bags to head towards the nearest light source.

Amundsen has no use for Arthur alive, so anyone after the bounty will have cut his throat by now. But there are other possibilities. The back road to Kenya, rattling over former minefields and dirt tracks that vanish into nothing, has its attractions for law-breakers as well as refugees, and in his current distracted state, Arthur looks like a slight, defenceless target. Pistol in hand, Eames eases his way up to where a splinter of light escapes from a gap between the scraps of plywood on the lean-to at the edge of the admin complex.

In the light of a single bar fluorescent emergency lamp, Arthur is on his knees. As Eames shifts his perspective around, half-consciously planning the best angle to get off two shots into the shadowy corners before the return of fire, Arthur leans back, providing a clear view of the diesel generator in front of him. The side panel been pulled off it to reveal its four cylinders paused mid-stroke.

Arthur blows through the holes of a mesh disc and slots it back in place amongst the dusty machinery. "How long has it been smoking?"

A soft-footed man steps forward from the corner as he answers, "I don't know exactly." Scandinavian accented. Eames is pretty sure he saw him with the Oxfam team, but it's easy to confuse one dreamy, bearded liberal abroad with any of the others. "I thought it was coming from the other generator, but then yesterday the other one died, and the smoke kept coming."

"The filter isn't too bad. Here-" With a spanner and then his fingers, Arthur twists out a couple of bolts and drops them into the other man's waiting hand. When he lifts down the lamp to get a closer look, his face looks focused with a calm Eames has not seen for some time. Arthur's stillness has always seemed the repressed and defensive self-discipline kind, but right now there's something of the zen master in the attention he trains on his task as he eases out a black metal cylinder with a perpendicular butt, shaped not unlike a firearm.

"There," he says in a whisper, dipping his finger into the tarry residue that is dislodged when he taps it. "Shitty fuel quality will do that. You get your diesel locally, do you?"

"From Uganda by truck. Here."

He hands over a rag from his pocket. Arthur grins up at him as if this was a success achieved together and starts cleaning the component. "You'll need a new washer straight away, and a whole new injector within the next few months. I'll write the specs down for you."

It couldn't be more different from the way he puts his proposals when an extraction is taking shape, as if he fully expected to have to defend each idea against the fiercest resistance. Eames can only think what he could have made of their first meeting, if he'd intuited this side of Arthur from the outset – the side that just wanted to be useful in a field that was all his own – and put on the sort of persona that played up to it. Instead of all the energy they'd wasted sabotaging each other, he might have got Arthur eating out of the palm of his hand.

There's a swift metallic click as Arthur slots the injector back into place, the whir of the generator restarting, and then the camp lights come up all at once.

"Hey," Eames says groggily, much later, when Arthur has finally come back to their sheltered spot in the lead-up to sunrise. "Tell you what. I can shave a grand off my fee if it's got so bad you need to do odd jobs for cash."

Arthur appears exhausted now, the glaze of calm gone from his eyes, as if the journey from the generator room had lasted days instead of minutes. He swings his bag over his shoulder and says, "When do we move on?"

**

Throughout the long, bumpy ride to Kisumu, Arthur starts to look increasingly uncomfortable. It's Eames who has to put in gruelling hours with the MSF team they finally catch up with, playing off their excruciating sense of noblesse oblige long enough to glean all the information he needs to impersonate a straggling, adventurous colleague lost en route to Nairobi. He even gets a t-shirt out of it, from an anaesthetist who's on his way home to write a PhD.

In the dusty expanse of the Kisumu bus station, Arthur peers into the late afternoon haze a bit muzzily, as if he might stumble right onto Cobol's front doorstep if he didn’t have Eames there to grab the loose handle of his bag and drag him in the right direction.

"When was the last time you ate?" Eames frowns.

"Lunch," Arthur snarls out of nowhere. As if Eames's observational skills might be too piss-poor to have noticed that what he ate for that particular meal was about four millimetres in diameter and came out of a silver foil wrapping.

They head to the left of the hospitals, hotels and government offices that form the city's sparse high-rise, down towards the waterfront where Emmanuel's mate's cousin is letting them have a room. It's more than 72 hours since he saw Arthur down a Gloria Jean's egg and mayo in Changi. Eames knows from bitter experience that the prescription of just getting the fuck on with it is a highly short-term cure, and he can picture with grim accuracy the sort of state which a few more days' starvation will put Arthur into by the time they get to the business end of the job.

The room is one storey up, out the back of an auto repair shop with a sign painted straight onto corrugated iron sheet – the primary structural material of the city. The pattern of dust on the floor discloses that it's been used for storage until fairly recently, and has been living quarters only in the drop-in, temporary sense. There is an actual single bed in the far corner, and a thin mattress tied up tight with twine, propped by the sink. The low pile of crates against one wall will have to do for shelving.

Arthur looks as if he'd been picturing something closer to the Metropole and is having trouble reconciling himself to the no-frills reality.

"Get on the bed," Eames tells him, which is a pretty stupid way to put it, all things considered. He realises this when Arthur's glare practically slices like an axe between his eyes. "Or don't," he goes on blithely, turning on the tap above the sole basin in the room to discover explosive water pressure that quickly dwindles. "Up to you. But the job is on hold until you look like a human being again." He glances back to where Arthur is trying to grip the wall so as not to sway on his feet. "Relatively speaking."

Arthur doesn't waste energy fighting battles he can't win, but he never lets them go either. Eames can see him clocking his own physical disadvantage and storing up some scathing remarks for later. But for now, he takes his bag onto the bed and pulls his laptop from it.

"We passed the bathroom downstairs," Eames says. "Don't get your hopes up. I'll be back in a while."

When he returns an hour later with mosquito nets, a second pistol and a pot for the portable gas cooker on the floor under the sink, Arthur is passed out across the bed, dead to the world with afternoon sun from the window picking out the beads of sweat on his forehead.

Eames thinks of the third choice he could have made in Hanoi: accept Arthur's money and sell him out to Cobol anyway. Right now, they wouldn't even need a team to take him down. He might have given more thought to it if he'd imagined Arthur like this, stripped of the impression of invincible hyper-competence which he so vigilantly cultivates.

The hair over Arthur's temple is heavy with sweat when Eames touches it, and warm. Arthur doesn't stir, his eyelids completely still in deep sleep. So Eames leaves his fingers where they are, listening to the clatter of tools in the auto repair shop, thinking how one moment slips irretrievably into the next, how nothing lasts, how he'll be back in Marseille in a week, airing out his apartment, and Arthur will either be alive or dead. Thinking what a strange final memory this would be to carry in his mind.

Even with the team members Arthur likes most, he has always been aloof about his life outside extraction. Has he ever, Eames wonders, kept a woman or a man in a well appointed apartment to come back to between one job and the next? Apart from the chemist Anna-Luisa, who was probably lying when she hinted that she'd turned down his advances after a job in the UAE, Arthur has left no romantic imprint in the industry. But then it would be just like him to put a wall between work and pleasure. Eames thinks it's a shame, because even a gifted point man like Arthur won't be remembered for long on the basis of professional reputation alone.

From the blue plastic bag, Eames takes out the ingredients for a thin cornmeal porridge mixed with shreds of salty dried beef that's helped him out of gut trouble before, and speculates on how many meals it will take to return Arthur to his fiercely capable, unapproachable best.

 **

Cobb calls soon after, evidently apprised already of the new number Arthur acquired only yesterday.

"Yes?"

It's highly gratifying to note that he gets the same short shrift which Eames is used to.

Since Arthur's in poor condition to leave the bed, and has nowhere but the street outside to retreat to, Eames has the rare privilege of eavesdropping. The experience is disappointing as Arthur's side of the conversation is limited to frowning prompts like "When?" and "Anyone hurt?", and the tersely repeated assertion that "Yes, I'm on it".

His face is like a thundercloud by the time he tells Cobb, "Well how about you keep your head down for a few more days and don't do anything stupid," and hangs up before Cobb can reply.

"Poor man," Eames says, after an interval. "So he still can't find a babysitter long enough to come over here and help you save his trust-funded arse?"

Arthur sinks back into the covers and closes his eyes. The puffiness at the top of his cheeks, the product of too much sleep, makes him look young all of a sudden. A couple of minutes later, he reaches for the now warm lemonade can Eames had left by the bed. Then he rolls onto his side and says, "Some rough characters have been poking around near Cobb's father-in-law's place. They haven't hit on the right questions yet, but the way they were asking sounds like they don't mean to go away without answers."

Eames knows the type well enough not to press for details. "And the guys who tracked me down in Hanoi were completely off the radar," Arthur continues. "No connections. We've got nothing."

That does leave Eames a little chilled deep in his bones, because Arthur and Cobb's radars between them cover every piece of illicit business from dreamshare to military technology trading to CIA black ops, and every branch of the criminal underworld that does business with any of them. Add to that the fact that Eames's own contacts have had nothing to give him, and the only conclusion is that Amundsen has set an exceptionally wide net for his one-man quarry.

Everything depends upon the assumption that Amundsen is less well acquainted with the intractable side of Arthur's nature than Eames is, and has counted on him running for his life rather than bringing the fight onto Cobol's home territory.

"Bright side is," Eames observes archly, "at least your boy Cobb has got some incentive to help you fix this thing now."

The only reply he gets is a sleepy murmur that he assumes is in disagreement.

**

"What smells so good?" Arthur says drowsily, a while later. He extricates himself from his feverish tangle in the bed's sole sheet and reaches for the shirt he'd thrown off in sleep, pushes back the damp hair stuck flat over his forehead.

Eames turns back to the tin pot he's heating over the portable gas flame. "That's you on the mend then, is it?"

There's a non-committal grunt then the sound of Arthur stretching as long and hard as his limbs can take.

The beef is another half hour at least off tenderness, but when he ladles off a few spoons of the liquid and lavishes it with salt, it makes a tasty enough soup, poured in a bowl over yesterday's bake-house bread. He takes it over to the bed as Arthur finishes pulling his clothes back on.

"Not bad," Arthur says after the fifth or sixth urgent mouthful, and after a few more adds, "Just what I needed."

Something about the unguarded way he says it suggests that being forced to surrender to simple physical needs like fatigue and hunger has fractionally lowered his personal defences too. Eames sits on the other end of the bed, hunching forward over his knees. The scrape of plastic spoon against plastic bowl begins to slow down. He has the sense of a door about to close.

"Listen, Arthur. You're keeping other options open, right?"

The spoon pauses. "Has something happened?"

"I might as well earn my fee, right? Give you value for money. Talk me through your back-up plans."

He watches Arthur chase a small island of bread around the glistening specks of fat on the surface of the soup. "There's only one. Run and hide. Indefinitely."

And he goes on eating, without so much as a quelling look to deflect criticism of the manifest inadequacy of that strategy. Arthur has a civilian life to go back to, Eames is pretty certain of that. One of the benefits of his fastidious professional privacy is that no-one in the trade has the slightest idea of who he is outside extraction. He could slip into a new alias, in some unexpected provincial city, and spend the next five or ten years carrying a concealed hand gun and sleeping in the middle of a spiderweb of alarm systems, waiting for Amundsen to forget him. Into his shoes will step someone like Mick Tierney, who cut his teeth running amphetamines and views dreamscapes as a convenient way to wield torture without leaving physical evidence.

"It's only Amundsen who's after you, right?" Eames watches his own hand splay out, one or two specks of dried meat caught in the corners of his fingernails, and swiftly clenches it into a fist. "Look, I can find someone who'll take care of him."

The only evidence that Arthur heard at all is a hesitant exhale around his mouthful. He goes on cleaning the plate.

"I've got contacts over the border in the Congo who'd wipe out their own mother for the price of a second-hand car." Since this is further than his previous attempts have got without being cut off dismissively, Eames continues. "The men who come out of that godawful place have got their own way of thinking. And some of them wind up at Cobol, in the end. I can find you someone."

Arthur doesn't look disgusted, a reaction which Eames had considered a possibility and planned to overcome by speaking plainly and calmly. He just looks tired. He leans back against the wall and pulls his knees up in front of him.

"And what if it comes out that I was behind it? What would Cobol do?"

"You'd be no worse off than you are right now. Worth the risk, I'd say."

When Arthur tips his head back, the line of his windpipe looks thin and strained. "No worse for me, sure. How many point men have you worked with, Eames?"

"Three."

A faint smile touches Arthur's face. "Is it Danziger you're not counting?"

"He was more like a school prefect. Made a lot of noise and never once put his arse on the line."

The moment of amusement lingers comfortably before Arthur breaks it. "There's only half a dozen of us, non-military. That's what you don't see, swanning in and out like you do. Dreamshare is small, if you don't include the fakers and the jumped up con-men."

"Look, if you're saying the industry can't go on without you-"

"I'm saying you know what happened to Caspian Gas."

Eames laughs outright at the idea that Cobol might go that far over the assassination of one employee. But it makes him uncomfortable to think of dreamshare as a cohesive entity capable of having wounds inflicted on it, when to him they are low-profile solo players who drift away like smoke at the end of each job, uncatchable.

"Their three top executives are still locked up in the Gulag, location unknown. Is that what you want for da Souza? For Ariadne? Yourself?"

Caspian Gas's crime was to win one of China's most lucrative supply contracts by bidding lower and dirtier than Cobol. It would take some paranoia to see Amundsen's death as a declaration of war by their loosely knit profession. But then Cobol, hiding a lot of skeletons in its closet even for a multi-national resources giant, is dreamshare's natural enemy, and it was healthy paranoia that kept Eames in regular militarisation work for the last few years.

"Fuck them all, that's what I'd say. You don't owe any of them."

Attention fixed on some distant point past the empty window frame, Arthur's fingertips have drifted to the inside his elbow, scratching.

"I was 22 when I did my first extraction, Eames. The only job I had before that was summer work in a cell phone showroom. I guess it's too late for me to tell an entire industry to go fuck itself."

In spite of all the instincts warning against it, Eames can't help wanting to know.

"You were extracting in college? Before the Guantanamo tests?"

"Don't make assumptions," Arthur says, snapping into his business voice.

He leans over to retrieve his laptop from where Eames had connected it to the power cord that runs up from the generator downstairs to recharge and flips it open, the light from the screen painting a pale rim around the bottom of his irises.

When the stew is ready, Eames refills the bowl, but Arthur seems to have lost his appetite.

"Your call," Eames tells him. "The offer's there if you want to do it the easy way."

Arthur takes a polite spoonful, and nods as if to confirm that the subject will never be mentioned again.

**

Cap pulled low, head down, Eames cuts through the close-pressed mud brick houses of Kalolena. Late afternoon on the open streets and the sun still comes down like a hammer on his head and shoulders, and even here in the shade, it still radiates from the western facing walls and the corrugated iron roofs. He feels warm through to the marrow, enjoying the extra strain on his muscles and heart of working in the heat, had missed this about Kenya, this and the easy talk of strangers on street corners, no pretension, no automatic mistrust, reminding him of home.

A young girl sitting on the side of a culvert where her mother is washing clothes watches him pass with open curiosity. He keeps off the main roads because the European population here is small, and he's going to be conspicuous anywhere between the yacht club, the golf course and the high-walled communities in which most of them live.

Being a supervisor, Emmanuel lives in the northern end of Nyalenda, in the shadow of the well-to-do enclave of Milimani. His brick house, like its neighbours, is three rooms, with running water. Eames ducks round the corner to sit out of sight against the back wall and wait for him.

"What are you doing?" Emmanuel asks gravely, once they're done with catching up on the well-being of his daughter and his sons, his fortunes on the card table and the latest strife at the plant. From the switch to English, it's clear that he knows how serious this is, and wants to make sure there are no misunderstandings. Eames takes a casual swig from one of the beer cans he brought with him.

"Just dealing in a little information. Very quiet, I guarantee it."

"You guarantee it."

In his forties, Emmanuel is used to managing a workforce that ranges from young labourers in the bloodrush of their first paycheques, to wily veterans of the furnaces bearing bitter grudges, and allowing neither to take advantage. He and Eames have a friendship of sorts, based on their mutual experience of being the kind of men who get the job done. A friendship, nothing more. Emmanuel's loyalty will extend as far as his own safety requires, and as far as Eames's fee dictates. Beyond that, Arthur will be on his own.

"Yeah, I do." Eames slips the paper-wrapped packet of bills onto the table between them, "And if it all turns to shit, there'll be no-one left alive to give you away."

The sombre mood doesn't lift, but keeps creeping back, in between the laughs they share over a cigarette and another beer.

"This is a bad time," Emmanuel frowns as Eames is leaving under cover of dusk. "We lost two men this month. The men in the plant, they are angry. The bosses in their office block, they are afraid, and fear makes them cruel. Another man has gone missing, a driver who brought trouble on himself. Your friend should take care."

"I'll pass that on," Eames tells him, and slips off along the unpaved lanes, going briskly to get out of the unelectrified township before nightfall.

**

When Eames spreads out Emmanuel's delivery schedules and rosters on top of a crate, Arthur pores over them as avidly as pornography.

"Let's use the ore drop-offs," he says, still scanning them. "Time my arrival point to match one. It's a good distraction."

The supply of fresh information has energised him like a generous shot of caffeine. It's a welcome return to form.

Eames disagrees, "Wouldn't rely on it. Those arrival times are wishful thinking. A bit of traffic throws them off schedule, or a flat tyre, or an argument with the guards out at the mine site. Especially at the moment – your safety report seems to have turned the place into even more of a tinderbox than usual."

"Your idea," Arthur murmurs, still scanning the pages, but his face has lit up a little more.

When he thinks back to the night in the Metropole that had given birth to this plan, it's as if he had made it with another person entirely. The battery operated lamp highlights the faint black shadow where illness has knocked Arthur out of his shaving routine. His t-shirt is crumpled from being washed in hotel sinks. He's got down on one knee to use the crate as a table, no longer wary of Eames's presence behind him, not shrinking away as Eames reaches past to tilt the paper towards him and tap the entry he wants.

"Use the afternoon departure schedule. As long as no machinery breaks down overnight, they leave at four sharp, to make the coast by morning. I can probably get an unscheduled goods delivery from the Coke plant if you want a lot going on."

"Thanks." Putting aside the distraction of the schedules, Arthur turns over his shoulder with a long, thoughtful look. "Could you-" He fetches his laptop and passwords it open, handing it over quickly. "Tell me if anything looks out of place."

They're share records, for sizeable holdings in a couple of minerals exploration ventures in the DRC, and the company register for a new entity set up three weeks ago in Amundsen's sole name. Eames has never owned shares, but he's helped on enough of Charlie's scams to know his way around. He goes through the documents meticulously, cross-checking the registration numbers until he's satisfied that it will pass a cursory investigation. If he knows Cobol, it will never come to more than cursory. Treachery gets dealt with swiftly, and if Arthur can make Cobol's management suspect that Amundsen has been back-door dealing on the scale these documents show, then in his wildest dreams he can't hope for anything resembling due process. He'll be lucky if he gets the chance to say a prayer.

**

By midnight, Arthur's got the whole thing modelled up in the middle of the floor, a miniature of the Cobol plant made out of old boxes and some bolts and rubber strips scrounged from the auto repair downstairs. Pegged out in shredded white vinyl upholstery is the route Arthur will take, from the armed checkpoint at the gate, to the loading yard where Emmanuel will come out to meet him, leading him into the noise and smoke of the smelter room. After that, the office block, where they will detour to search out an urgently needed copy of ISO 12100, buying Arthur his twenty minutes of sabotage time.

Two of Arthur's fingers come to rest lightly on the crate representing the office block, right where the stairwell would open onto the top floor. "Why isn't there a second camera here?" Looking far from happy, he stretches over to re-check the schematic Hamid had sent through before he went silent. "I know you trust your guy, Eames, but there's no way a competent designer would leave a blind spot forty feet from the manager's door."

The bedrock of Eames's trade is working out whose judgment he can stake his life on. On that count, you don't get second chances. Hamid is one of the select few in that elite class of professionals Eames trusts not to fuck up, and not to need his work checked, ever. But then, on the other hand, so is Arthur.

"Head of Security is-" Truth be told, Worner is a vicious, methodical, cold-blooded tyrant – the sort of sadist who, if Cobol hadn't found a use for his particular skill set, would be snatching tramps and prostitutes off the highway to find out how they looked inside out. Eames settles for, "- old school. He wouldn't miss a hole like that."

Their eyes meet over the model, thoughts in synch.

"Unless someone wanted to be able to get in and out of the building without showing up on camera. Looks like Amundsen's had some help then."

The way Arthur says it, there's a fleeting trace of both arousal and determination that takes Eames back to their nights in the Metropole. "Looks like."

"All right," Arthur says softly. "We're done. Get me a date for Thursday."

**

The diner run by Emmanuel's sister and brother-in-law contains two small, mismatched tables and a scattering of plastic stools. At half past eight on a Tuesday, the work-bound crowd stopping in for mandazi and tea has well and truly dissipated. The lingering smell of hot oil and spices makes him sorry for Arthur, who about now will be making his rendezvous with Eames's last trusted contact – lanky George who used to be his local driver and his girlfriend who is a cleaner in the office block – coming off shift from the morning roster, at an out-of-the-way railway siding where there will be nothing for breakfast but timber scraps and the rusty skeletons of old carriages.

Eames has barely slipped into a corner seat, furthest away from the unglazed window that serves as take-away counter, light source and ventilation for the little room, before Dorphine has the phone to her ear. Emmanuel arrives at the table before his tea does. He betrays no signs of worry, big hands relaxed and open on the peeling wood veneer. Natural stoicism compounded by the cool head of experience, he could bluff nonchalance with the best of Eames's family, but a stillness about him says something is wrong.

"You couldn't get it," Eames concludes.

"It's no use to you now." Emmanuel drops a finger-sized strip of paper on the tabletop, nonetheless, its curl obscuring half of the ten digit security code. "They walked Omuya to the gates yesterday. Closed them behind him, one of his foremen too. There was a fire in A Furnace – shut us down the whole of the night, and they must have someone to blame, this time."

Eames pushes the newly arrived plate of doughnuts across to him. Emmanuel looks even wearier than a disaster filled night shift should explain. "Can you get us someone else's code before Thursday?"

With a long, thoughtful exhale, Emmanuel tells him no. "You must wait. The time is wrong."

Even as he nods, Eames is running through all the remaining staff with access to the third storey – sifting out those who could be bought, tricked or stolen from. "Eames, you tell your friend he must wait. I saw them search all the day men before they enter. They search the trucks coming in, going out. And if a driver is five minutes late, they are tracking, tracking the GPS. They think that these news stories have brought Western money to pay for sabotage. Worner has got himself three new men – men from the Congo with no family here, no loyalty, no-"

It takes Eames's thoughts a moment to catch up. "The drivers. Is it just the forty-tonners they're tracking, or the delivery lorries too?"

He is already closing his hand around his sunglasses as Emmanuel shrugs. "Everything."

Eames is out the door in a moment, hood up, glasses on, trying to keep himself to a casual pace as he weaves through the shantytown's dirt alleys. George is meeting Arthur on the way back from a railway pick-up. Worner will factor in a little time for unscheduled delays, but all it takes is one call to his well greased palms at the station to find out that George has completed his errand. He hails a boda-boda as soon as he reaches a junction. The bike rider's guarded look implies that a white man in Manyatta can only have come for whoring, extortion or something worse, but the young man, as Eames hoped when he picked him from the others, pedals twice as hard to make up for his shorter stature and in no time they are hurtling down the highway, towards the railway yards along the shore.

Arthur has proved himself smarter and more resilient topside than Eames would have given him credit for two weeks ago, but he's still a civilian, and although George is a good man, he's the sort of good man who wants to stay alive long enough to marry his girlfriend and give her some children. Arthur's phone doesn't answer on the third try; it was never likely he'd have taken it with him. Directing the bicycle onto the verge, Eames parts with a handful of notes and hauls himself up over the sagging wire fence behind the Municipal Works Yard, onto the railway tracks.

The last time he ran until his lungs ached was in Macau, with a laptop full of military briefing documents under his arm, a six-hundred-year-old vase on his back, and the furious shots from their pursuers slamming futilely into the plaster a half a flight of stairs above them. He'd ripped his side open on the smashed basement window they crawled out of, sworn to give himself a few lazy months of low-stakes cons, and yet here he is now, legs pumping him as fast as they can over the broken ground and rotten timber scraps, slipping on the dry dirt, racing towards the lorry he can just make out behind the bolted up storage shed. He is not armed, though Worner and his men will be, and any rusty lengths of steel lying around will long ago have been appropriated to prop up the shantytowns.

He's still a good way short when he sees the Cobol car making its approach, a low-down black model with sun glinting off its windscreen as it follows the detour up north to where the road makes a steep dive underneath the tracks then doubles back to the siding at which he can now make out George's figure standing at the rear of the lorry. With enough warning, Arthur should be able to take out the first man out of the car, maybe the second, but his odds are not good against a man like Worner, who fires a kill shot as casually as flicking a bug off his sleeve.

It happens fast. Coming into full view of the lorry, Eames sees Arthur crouched in its shade by the rear wheel, ashing an unexpected cigarette against the tyre as he listens to George. He glances up as Eames clears a ditch, their eyes meet for a second, and his face draws instantly into alarm. In the same moment, Worner's engine revs into hearing distance and Eames just has time to pull back into the cover of the ditch before the black car brakes up close in a cloud of dust.

A second later, Arthur is scaling the canvas wall of the lorry, just out of sight of the car, finding unlikely footholds in the rigging that binds its edges to the frame. He moves with a concealed strength that rarely reveals itself in his day-to-day work, and the focused efficiency that so often does. By the time the car is emptying, he is flat on the roof. The only trace of his presence is the third cigarette smoking gently in the dirt.

The girlfriend, whose name Eames promises then and there to find out, pulls George against the side of the truck, snaps open the front of his jeans, and kisses him hard.

"On your knees," Worner barks as he clears the back of the lorry. "Keep your hands where I can see them."

At the click of the safety coming off, the couple leave off fumbling with their clothes and quickly do as they're told. George carefully grinds the butt of Arthur's cigarette with the flat of his boot as he goes down. Two others, some of the Congo men Emmanuel spoke about, come up behind him, firearms held as casually as lager cans in their hands.

Worner raises his boot and kicks George in the middle of the chest. Forty something, sturdily built, accustomed to reinforcing his authority with his fists, he sends the taller man collapsing backwards. "Get up."

Cobol is a brutal workplace. A man who breaks its hierarchical rules can wind up with a beating that leaves him unable to get out of bed for a week, or for the rest of his life. George gets back on his knees, eyes lowered, dust clinging to his shirt, and Eames glances up, thinking of the gun that is almost certainly in Arthur's hand, straining to think of a way he could put a bullet through Worner's back without courting attention and exposing himself here in his enemy's very backyard.

"Is this your truck?" The mouth of Worner's gun comes to rest against George's temple, its muzzle sliding down to dig hard into the flesh of his cheek.

"No sir," George says in a soft voice that is nothing like the ringing, grinning bass that Eames remembers from their long hours driving between cities.

Worner moves over to the girlfriend, hooks his pistol under the hem of her dress and lifts it.

"Is it her truck?"

She does not resist, does not cry. Her gaze is distant, as if looking onto the other side of what is happening here and now. She seems, Eames thinks, like someone who just might wipe Worner from the face of the earth if life is ever good enough to give her the opportunity.

"No sir," says George, even softer. "It is the company's truck. I am sorry. The fuel, I will pay-"

"You." Worner gives the girlfriend a shove back towards the direction of their approach. "Go home. You are going to work for half pay this month."

Smart lady, she walks and doesn't look back. She is quickly lost to sight behind the lorry.

Worner crouches down to say something undoubtedly unpleasant in George's ear. "Lucky for you, you have some equipment I need in here," he adds, standing. "You can't deliver it safely with a broken arm. You see that it gets there directly."

"Yes sir."

He plucks a bundle of notes from George's shirt pocket. "For my time. Don't waste it again."

Signalling to one of the Congo men to take the passenger seat in the truck, Worner returns to his vehicle and pulls it onto the yellow grass beside the road, ready to follow. Eames hastily scans the path ahead, thinking of the fifteen minutes of highway between here and the Cobol plant. The one chance for Arthur to get off the roof unseen will be the underpass, if the angle of the road as it climbs back up is steep enough for the railway bridge to shield him.

Eames is running before the truck beings to move, bent double and following the line of the ditch which runs alongside the tracks. The big engine starts up. He scrabbles on hands and knees over a shallow section lined with rubbish, tumbles down the other side and keeps going. George takes his time getting up to second gear. A rusting skeleton of a carriage provides the cover Eames needs to dart up over the track, to the far side, where it starts to rise up to clear the underpass. His misses his step, tears the skin over his ankle bone open on a protruding bolt, and lurches the last few metres into the middle of the bridge.

The sides of the bridge are corrugated iron. No handholds. He leans over it as the truck emerges underneath him, grumbling slowly into the uphill climb. Arthur's legs come into view, indenting the tarpaulin roof, then his waist with the gun still tucked into the small of his back. In a single movement, the moment the sightlines of the Cobol car are blocked by the bridge, Arthur draws his legs under him and launches himself up, reaching out in blind faith as if he could get a grip on the seamless metal by will alone. His determined expression doesn't falter as, mid-flight, he sees Eames and adjusts. Their hands connect, locking wrist to wrist, and Eames pulls him up until he can swing one foot onto the top of the iron sheet and land beside him. Under the hand Eames raises to steady him as he finds his balance, every muscle is tense. Then the black bonnet glints into view and he pulls Arthur down.

The crunch of tyres on the dirt road recedes into the distance. The pulse in Arthur's arm is frantic as Eames lets him go. Under the heat of adrenalin, he smells faintly of the cigarette, the incongruous scent of a working man on break or a casual night on the town.

"Do we need to go after him?" Arthur asks, consequences and strategies apparently coming together before he has even extracted himself from where he half-fell over Eames's legs.

Eames considers as his ragged breathing slows down. George has driven for enough senior managers that Worner won't be able to justify a bloody interrogation session without better evidence than a grope with his sweetheart in the backroads. "No."

"Then let's get going."

As he stands, he takes in the damage around the knees of Eames's trousers, the sweat-drenched cling of his shirt down the sides and back. He only adds, "We're moving it forward a day. If they get what was in that truck installed, we'll have even more work in front of us. Come on."

Eames takes his hand and pulls himself up. The pressure stings the fresh grazes on his palms.

**

In the photograph on the pass Eames is mocking up, Arthur is a few years younger, his hair worn short, a velvety textured curve over his forehead. The familiar directness of gaze is there already, but his deadly focus isn't yet, or perhaps the shot was taken in a moment of distraction. Eames tries to picture a friend off camera working a smile out of him, and can't.

The little room is sweltering with the afternoon sun beating on the thin tin roof. It doesn't help that he's bent over the gas stove, holding the plastic card in the invisible heat at the edge of its flame, artificially adding the warp of age in addition to the bends and scuffs he has already etched into its surface.

On the low mattress, Arthur lies still with one hand on his stomach and the other splayed out towards where the PASIV is doing its quiet work. His gun is under a newspaper by his side, but his shoes at least are off.

He's taking a long time to inspect the build that Eames left him with, but his bloody-minded insistence on perfection is not unjustified. The evidence that will seal Amundsen's fate has to be planted in hard copy in his secure third floor office, to corroborate the electronic files and damn him beyond any lingering doubts in the eyes of Cobol management. Only with a legitimate code for the management floor can they get in without leaving any evidence of a security breach. Since Hamid dropped out of contact without warning and their first mark got walked to the gate two days ago, they are down to their last desperate chance: extraction.

Most of the white management at Kisumu live in Milimani, on the southern outskirts of the city, at the end of the ring road that links the highway to the plant site and to the airport that whisks them off to meetings and the occasional trip to Europe without ever having to pass through the slums that belt the city centre to the west, north and south where the population sleeps six to a room under iron scraps and scavenges a day's paid labour wherever it's going. Breaking into the compounds is the sort of challenge that would make Eames's mouth water, if it could be done with better planning and without the risk of generating attention they can't afford.

Jacob Mbote, a former engineer and now staff representative, is the only man high up enough to have a third-storey code who still lives in the suburbs. Incorruptible, smart, and most definitely militarised, he is a hurdle they have to find a way to clear, no matter what.

Eames is just finishing up when the dose runs low and Arthur starts to stir. He sits up and pulls out the needle in one practised movement, thumb going over the puncture wound and his forearm bending up for the few moments until the bleeding stops. He glances sharply around the room to make sure that his gun, his bag, and Eames are all exactly where he left them. Then he gets up and rolls up the IV. The fact that he doesn't instantly voice a single criticism this time is, Eames lets himself conclude, Arthur's inhumanly demanding equivalent of approval.

When Eames holds out the new photo ID, he comes over to take it.

"Nice shot," Eames says. "You look like you were a good little soldier."

"You're kidding," Arthur shoots back with disdain. He turns the card over, scratches at the corner where Eames spent forty minutes prising the laminated edges slightly loose to replicate five years of abuse. He goes over to his bag to empty out the contents of a brown leather wallet and slot the new card into it, scrutinising its appearance in situ. "I worked for a security contractor for a while. Strictly mercenary."

He says it not quite casually, as if it were information he has not had much experience in disclosing. Eames thinks through all the rumours about where the unofficial interrogation centres were, where the early model PASIVs were tested on subjects whom army command considered disposable; where an ambitious young man who'd got a whiff of the illicit technology in college might go to seek it out. The Guantanamo tests were pure military, the private sector didn't get a look in. But in Afghanistan- "Helmand, was it?"

Arthur turns an evaluating look on him. "And Kandahar." He collects the other two IDs Eames had made up over the afternoon and adds them in, along with a few scraps of paper from the contents he had discarded earlier, assembling his health and safety persona from nothing. "This is good work, Eames. Really good."

All this close quarters living must have finally taught Arthur a thing or two about interacting with his fellow man, because Eames doesn't hear his usual note of condescension.

"Why thank you," he mutters, packing up his kit and sliding it all into the bag Alex had handed him back in Heathrow. The Stanley knife clicks satisfyingly into its plastic case, not half as sharp as when he bought it in Juba just a few days back. He puts an elastic band around the remaining scraps of laminating sheet and drops them in too. As he comes up onto his knees, his legs and spine twinge, protesting against the best part of the afternoon spent hunched over, and under that is the ache from when he wrenched his back hauling Arthur off the roof of that truck. He grimaces and rolls his shoulders, as if that might be enough stop the injured ligaments seizing up.

Stealthy in bare feet, Arthur's sudden touch takes him by surprise. He tenses, instincts defensive, but Arthur persists, digs his thumb into the tender spot just under Eames's right shoulder blade while his fingertips stretch up to press down between collar bone and neck. The pulled muscles in his shoulder need a lot more thorough work than Arthur can provide right now. But the attention is welcome, the acknowledgement of the damage he's done himself. A luxury he wouldn't normally expect. He draws his shoulders forward, stretching the tension out of his muscles to let Arthur get between them. With family, injuries are good for whinging and bragging. On outside jobs, they have to be made light of, to stop any wavering colleagues from doubting his competence or taking advantage. This is something new.

What the impromptu massage lacks in anatomical precision, it makes up for in untempered strength, and that kind of rough treatment is so hard to come by that he finds himself succumbing quickly to the pleasure of it. When he lets his head roll forward, Arthur raises his hand to the side of Eames's neck to hold him still. It's hot and shocking where their skin connects. An out of place surge of arousal takes hold of Eames's body – the product of some deep, sub-conscious association between Arthur's hands and those strange nights of greedy carnal excess when all he had to do was name his next desire to have it satisfied.

"I had it under control," Arthur says coolly, jerking him out of recollection, thumb still rubbing hard and sweet beneath the shoulder blade. "Don't put yourself out of action before the job's delivered."

Not bothering to argue, Eames lets himself drift on a confusing mix of sleepy resignation, suspicion and half-restrained lust. Then they pack up the tools of their trade and head into the city to find out whether they can extract as a team without Cobb or da Souza to mediate between them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for your patience everyone - I'm travelling in a country where internet access is a lot harder to come by than I expected! Also, sorry about the formatting, I'm doing the best I can far from home.


	4. The guilty ones all die slowly

Eames is clearing the two empty Tusker cans into the plastic bag in the corner when Arthur finally comes up, rubbing at his wet hair with the hotel towel from Changi. When he closes the door behind him, his hand lingers on the knob, attention clearly absent from the physical plane. There's a place Arthur goes to, past the bluster and the raised voice and the scowl, past the bit where he puffs himself up in his Mafioso leather jackets to seem far more formidable than he is. A place that's all quietly radiating tension. 

The extraction failed. Mbote finished his night's drinking uncharacteristically early, and walked home almost stone cold sober, talking business into his cell phone as he went. Waiting hidden in their alleyway, they had to watch him go by, Arthur's expression looking like he might split open the back of Mbote's skull and pluck out the code direct. 

The application of water seems to have calmed him down a little, but it's still right over to his model that he goes, throwing the towel in the direction of his bag and missing. He tilts the south-west corner of the box representing the office block so that it sits on a perfect right angle again, then picks up his bulldog clipped bundle of schematics and sinks down on his knees for what looks like another round of cross-checking the security details against the three dimensional mock-up. 

It doesn't escape Eames's attention that he's wearing a t-shirt over underpants, as if dressed for a lazy night alone with a six pack in front of the television. As he twists under the bulb suspended from a ceiling hook, to move his shadow off the model, he appears oblivious to the fact that he's shed another of the layers he had scrupulously retained in their shared living space. 

It's a miscalculation on Arthur's part – of the interpersonal kind where his judgment is most fallible. They have a sexual history now, and that's not something that can be forgotten just because professionalism happens to demand it. Eames knows the feel of Arthur's body beneath him, knows where he is strong and where he yields, has not forgotten the agility of his mouth, or how his skin smells heated up with sweat and arousal. His gaze is drawn inevitably to the closely clad curve of Arthur's buttocks, the line of his spine shifting beneath the blue cotton as he works. 

Arthur sighs, frowning at the taped up cardboard as if the right level of concentration could produce a secret passage circumventing the third floor security door. He's a linear thinker, Arthur. What Eames had previously guessed from observation has demonstrated itself most clearly over these last few days of seeing his methods up close. One step leads to the next. Every action belongs in a carefully plotted out chain, in its allocated order. New facts fit into a carefully ordered matrix of known information. For Arthur, problem-solving is a painstaking process of testing each link in sequence, looking for false assumptions, looking for unconsidered consequences, mapping out the potential for the unexpected, following each line of reasoning to the very end. 

Eames, who plunges into the middle and works outwards, following the path of inspiration, and only considers the details and obstacles once the whole ambitious scheme is sketched out in his mind, would solve Arthur's dilemma in one brilliant flourish, if he could only think of a way. 

It's with all-round dissatisfaction that he stretches out on the low mattress beside the bed, still faintly horny and resenting the lack of privacy more than ever.

"The light goes off by two," he says. "Some of us have to sleep."

Arthur murmurs something that could be _okay_ or could be _fuck off,_ and Eames considers the matter closed, until he's woken in the dead of night to discover that it isn't the light that's the problem. For a few irritating minutes, he listens to a sound he hadn't heard since Hanoi: the angry shuffle of limbs as Arthur flips over in the dark, then back again, as if his mattress were sprung with spikes under every inch.

"Can't sleep?" Eames asks as neutrally as he can, once he's got sick of the sound of it. He can't help thinking how the exertion and endorphin flood of orgasm would put them both under like a dose of somnacin if he could turn back the clock by a few days and climb up onto the bed. 

There's the long silence of Arthur deciding whether to answer. Then, half muffled into the folded jacket that serves for his pillow, he says, "What the fuck is there to do in Marseille? You could live in Paris and visit on weekends."

The first time Arthur had crossed the line into small talk, on the first day rearranging this room to mark out their individual work spaces and think through protection for the two entry points of door and window, it had brought Eames's defences up like a front-on attack. The talk on jobs was always about trade: past successes, shifts in professional allegiance, far-fetched technological break-throughs, theoretical dreamscape paradoxes and other people's spectacular failures. Personal lives were closely guarded, Arthur's more unassailably than anyone's. So Eames had answered curtly, remaining vague about his childhood country of residence, and lying outright about his teenage years. 

But the closer this high-stakes job gets, the more it seems to dominate his immediate future, obscuring everything else. His next two days revolve around Arthur but, after that, he can't picture Arthur at all. In two days, he could be gone, and anything Eames tells him gone with him. The death sentence hanging over him encourages a false sense of urgency, and intimacy too.

Eames has built his career on the strict discipline of keeping everyone at a distance, everyone except family. He knows he's letting his guard down further every day. He knows the risks. But here, on familiar ground, on terms he set with all the advantages he could wish for, he can afford to take a few of those. 

"God save me from idiot romantics. You can fucking keep Paris. Even the Louvre doesn't look so impressive after you've conned it, and everything else is double the price. Marseille – Marseille is a filthy, swindling shit of a town and it's the real fucking deal." He tells Arthur about his club of choice for a reckless night out, embellishing extravagantly because it's not as if Arthur will ever go there. He's half-way through the story about how Jean-Vincent got mistaken for an indebted dealer and had to wrestle his way out of a sack at the bottom of the harbour when he catches something different in the silence. 

"Arthur?"

The slow huff of Arthur's breath catching against a fold in the jacket answers him. He stares at the ceiling for a bit, recalling the solid strength of Arthur's shoulder flexing under his mouth, hearing the remembered echo of the unguarded, needy murmur he'd won by surprise on that last morning in Singapore. He weighs up whether the haze of sleep might make Arthur at all receptive to Eames slipping into his bed and coaxing him into an easy exchange of hand jobs. 

But he's seen enough extractions go bad because team members couldn't wait until the cash was in hand to fuck each other; that's yet another reason to work with family. On the right sort of personality, adrenalin, high stakes and professional respect fuse together into an obsessive distraction that's deadly to a job well done, and Eames is far too experienced to jeopardise a tricky commission like this over something so trivial. There was a reason, he reminds himself again, that the physical side of the deal had ended when they touched down on African soil.

He thinks of a couple of people to look up the moment he steps off the plane back home. He must drift off to those thoughts because the next thing he knows, they've both slept soundly one day closer to the business end of the job. 

**

"Can you get me a silencer for this? Before tonight."

With the heel of his hand, Arthur is shoving the cartridge back into the M-77 Emmanuel had obtained for him yesterday. Probably skimmed off a Chinese shipment destined for one of the Congolese militias, it would have been ordered to be a threat and a menace – no need for subtleties like a silencer when you're prepared to shoot a man right in the face. 

"Not likely. What for?"

"Plan B. We bring him back here and extract the code by force. Two levels down I'll have enough time to break through his militarisation – you'll take me under this afternoon and show me everything you did on that job."

"In and out quietly, Arthur. Your words, not mine."

"Needs must," he replies, testing the on/off flick of the safety as casually as feeling out the fit of a new pair of shoes. 

"If a senior man like Mbote doesn't turn up to his shift tomorrow, they'll lock up like a prison and pull his code before you can use it." 

"Not if we come forward another day." The gun balanced in the angle between his thumb and forefinger always looks out of place to Eames, topside. He's lost track of whether the safety is on or off. 

"No. My background won't be in place that soon."

Arthur gives him a look like he blames lazy work for that, but fact of the matter is that impersonating the voice of a Congolese militia captain he met one single time on a noisy jungle airstrip is only going to work if he can be certain that his subject isn't dead, or anywhere his location can be easily checked. And getting information out of Goma is hardly a matter of a polite call to the national records office. 

"If you wanted full military back-up, you should have made Cobb hook you up with one of his CIA connections. But no, what you got was me – what you could afford was me – and on my turf, I'm not going in until the groundwork is 100%."

That must come out more aggressively than Eames intended, because Arthur looks puzzled for a moment before he figures out a reply. "If it's got to be Wednesday, you have to make it happen. No delays. No matter what."

It's got Arthur rattled, the new security equipment he got a glimpse of in the back of George's truck, that he reckons can't take more than 72 hours to get fully installed and commissioned. Eames isn't used to having to be the coolest head on a job. 

He puts down his copy of The Standard and goes over to physically remove the gun from Arthur's grasp. It takes insistent pressure – his fingers are tense, knuckles jabbing into Eames's palm, but they do eventually relent. 

"Yes," Eames tells him. "You can count on it. But for now, let's run through the sequence for tonight one more time, shall we? Like you said, it's a fucking ambitious piece-of-shit plan that's more than likely to go down in flames."

**

"Mission accomplished?" he asks that afternoon, although he can tell from the way Arthur has practically bounced up the stairs that it must be.

"You could say that. No casualties, maximum damage."

A bit of leaked petrol, a thrown cigarette butt, a canister left in an abandoned kiosk, and that's the main northbound road closed for a good part of the afternoon. The traffic heading out to the Cobol plant will be queued up behind the blockage, and it's a little piece of hell trying to reverse those forty tonne motherfuckers to get them onto the untarred back roads. 

If Mbote doesn't need a drink tonight, he's not human.

**

"Close-up was an hour and a half ago," Arthur finally snaps, after they've spent an excruciatingly long time wedged in behind a generator in an alley out back of a motorcycle repair shop, listening to the noise of the night time city close by, as if Eames hadn't made it perfectly clear to him that the legitimate bar which Mbote frequents also continues life as a high-stakes illicit card table once the doors officially shut. "Where the fuck is he?"

Eames's arm is starting to ache where the IV pierces the skin. He has the line wrapped round his fingers to stop the flow of drugs until the time is right. He tugs on it so the sting of needle shifting keeps him focussed.

"Steady on. You gave him a good reason to get wiped out."

One deep breath and Arthur has settled himself. Mortal peril did wonders for his planning, Eames reflects. "Fucking ambitious" was a fair description of the idea Eames had first pitched the night after their original mark had got the boot – the sort of crazy gamble where a single stroke of bad luck could throw the most precise planning into the gutter. What they're doing demands a full team and a week more prep than they've had. Through the line that joins them both to the machine, Eames can't feel a single quiver now, but the light from a back window where the alley joins the street is close enough to catch the white of Arthur's face, intent and unbending.

"Mister!" They both steel themselves. The boy they paid must be doing his job, distracting the nephew who'd been with Mbote in the bar with a request for a smoke, then the offer of a fresh-off-the-truck iPhone at irresistibly cheap prices. The answer comes in a drunken slur of Swahili as Arthur pulls aside the ragged newspaper sheet that they left lying at the end of the alley. Underneath it, a pile of costume jewellery and greenbacks glitters. 

The fake diamonds, sparkling in the plank of light from the window, catch Mbote's alcohol impaired attention and he follows the scattered jewellery into the alley. There is a glittering bracelet dangling from his hand as he reaches the generator and Arthur clocks him on the back of the head with the butt of his gun. It's not quite enough to knock him out cold, but as he goes down, Eames gets a knee in his back, losing his grip on the IV line as he struggles to hold him. Beside him comes the flash of Arthur flicking on a torch to find a vein, but before the line has gone in, Eames's vision fades and he collapses.

The dreamscape is every bit as brutal as it needs to be to force out the information they need in the tiny window before Mbote's militarisation kicks in. The stairwell of the Cobol office block is already thick with smoke when Eames finds himself in it, coughing from his first breath. He goes down on one knee to get under it, find the breath he's going to need in a moment. The heat from above pushes him down like a ten-tonne weight; the rush of air sounds cyclonic, and under it is the groan of straining steel reinforcement which Arthur had made him add, louder than he could have imagined.

His lungs are full of cinders and ash and awful chemical fumes by the time he hears the others arrive on the other side of the door. Mbote is hammering on it, shouting for everyone to get out until his voice is overcome by smoke. 

"The roof's going-" Arthur cries out, over the roar of the fire and the thunder of crashing panels, with the hint of expatriate European that, amid the smoke and the panic and the unreality of the dream could make him one of several Cobol managers. "We're going to lose them. My god, we're going to lose them all!" 

And still Mbote hammers and shouts and doesn't touch the security pad. Alcohol and somnacin make for a stupefying mix. They always knew he might need more. 

Eames tries to spit, but his mouth is too dry and his eyes are streaming. This was never going to be an easy forgery even at his sharpest, and his head is getting too light for the concentration he needs – his oxygen-starved heart is in panic even if his mind is wise to the illusion. 

"Why don't you get them out!?" Arthur cries from the far side of the door, voice cracking like a man genuinely staring death in the face. The second-hand horror chills Eames's blood. Mbote should be keying in the code, desperately drawing on the automatic memory in his fingers instead of the unreliable recollection of his thinking mind. They've been under for maybe twenty seconds in dreamspace time. The gold standard for militarisation to sort natural dreams from intrusions is thirty, and Cobol paid for da Souza to give them better than the very best. Somewhere above him comes the sound of several pairs of boots on the stairs, too heavy to be the usual projections. Military, without a doubt.

Eames closes his eyes and stretches until he feels the shift in skin and bone that he needs. 

"Daddy!" he screams through the door, in his best impression of Mbote's youngest daughter whom he'd met once, nearly two years ago. "I can't breathe. Daddy!" 

The door doesn't open, despite the frantic beep of fingers on the keypad. Eames screams again, weaker, as the building's walls begin to tremble. Mbote cries out and keys in the code again, calling her name now, brokenly, hammering on the metal. 

Out of the black smoke filling the stairway above comes a crackle of machine gun fire. Brick dust showers over him from where the bullets strike and, before he can work out the direction of fire, hits to his shoulder and thigh take him down. "Daddy!" he screams one last time, his grip on the forge already failing as his cheek strikes the concrete floor and the three black-uniformed agents of Mbote's militarisation fall on him, guns raised. 

From the other side of the door comes the shot to indicate that Arthur has seen the sequence enough times to be certain he's got it. 

By the time Eames comes around, Arthur has both of their lines out and is scrawling on the back of his hand. He packs away the PASIV in a few neat movements, takes in Mbote's line as Eames withdraws it and flicks the catches on the case closed, their hands moving in well rehearsed synchronisation. By the time the mark makes the first clumsy twitches of consciousness, they have him propped up between them, back where the alley feeds onto the street.

Just out of sight, the boy is saying, 'Thanks, Mister."

Under the influence of alcohol and the unaccustomed dose of somnacin, Mbote is barely conscious enough to bear his own weight as they release him and watch him stumble against the far wall under the lit window. Eames scoops up the jewellery and greenbacks as Arthur strews glass from his pocket in their place. A heartbeat later, they're back in the shadow behind the generator as Mbote struggles to turn around, leaning heavily on the wall and peering into the darkness which he knows, in some unfathomable way, has just attacked him.

This is the most fragile moment. This is where they are vulnerable, trapped in a corner from which they can't fight their way out without announcing themselves in a shower of bullets. Mbote nudges at the glass shards with his boot, as if it might uncover what he saw before. Arthur is holding his breath, hand shifting round to the gun tucked at the small of his back. 

The nephew pats Mbote on the back, catching up, and asks if he needs a younger man to do his drinking for him next time. He puts his arm around his uncle's shoulder, urging him on.

They'd had Mbote out of sight for forty-five seconds at most. In less than a minute, they went in, got their data, and slipped out again. The nephew pulls him down the street, laughing and clutching the back of his shirt by way of support, as they resume their homeward journey. Mbote laughs too, groggily. Neither man looks back.

"Fuck yes," Eames says, low down and leaning close to Arthur's ear. 

It's like walking out of the Bank of Ireland coming off his first con back in the nineties. It's like pulling a grandiose plan back from the brink of disaster. Even the three levels of the Fischer job, with its bitter tasting fuck-ups and lies and bad blood, didn't touch this. Forty-five seconds. 

"I'm calling it," he grins. "We just pulled off the fastest extraction in history. You and me."

Forty-five seconds, with no back-up, no budget – just brilliant execution and a chemical blend Arthur had diluted himself in their shabby little room yesterday morning

"Save it, Mr Eames," Arthur tells him, not quite steadily. "It's not wrapped up yet."

The voice of Mbote's nephew is scarcely audible now, fading into the noise of a television turned up loud somewhere down the street, and music playing one storey up.

Forty-five seconds and this is only Eames's second string business, the one he turns to when family tensions run too high. Forty-five seconds on a subject militarised by the man who taught Eames his trade. He wants to let off fireworks. They fucking deserve them.

From behind, he tilts Arthur's forearm up so they can both see the ten digits scrawled in black marker pen that, just over a minute ago, were invisible neuron impulses locked inside Mbote's head. Fuck it, this is better than the Bank of Ireland.  
Eames could do a victory lap of the entire fucking city. He can hear himself breathing like a victorious sprinter. He hasn't got the faintest idea how Arthur, whose life just got one step closer to saved, can hold himself so calm and still. 

"You weren't so bad either," Eames tells him, smudging the top of a figure eight that's still a little wet, "for a—"

Arthur whips around, grabs Eames hard by the shoulder, and brings their mouths together hard. The sheer improbability of it stuns him for a moment – he makes a startled noise, muffled into Arthur's jaw, and by then, Arthur's got his forearm hooked around the back of Eames's neck, wielding his full strength to lock Eames into the kiss. It's the single most inappropriate proposition of Eames's career, and he would swear he'd banished his idle sexual fantasies after last night, but there they are, hungry as ever, right under his skin, making him grip Arthur's waist and answer him in kind. 

He shoves Arthur against the wall beside the generator, and that turns Arthur brutal, one hand forcing its way under Eames's shirt to grab roughly all over his chest, thumbing his nipple, clawing with his neatly clipped fingertips as though he needs to get under the skin, and that – 

That's what does Eames in. Because Arthur never wants anything, except a well grounded plan and a job neatly done. Everything he does, he does in moderation and the coldest of blood. Except this. With the professional precision of the job just done vanished completely, Arthur's a mess of sharp teeth and artless, unresponsive rhythm, eyes half-closed with a deep frown on his brow while his hands are getting sharper and clumsier by the second.

"Bloody hell, Arthur-" Eames kisses his hot mouth and gets a hand on the angle of his jaw to hold him still. 

Eames is not, despite the impression it suits him to give, a taker of stupid risks. He is too used to people depending on him who he doesn't want to lose. He runs the odds when they're good, once as many contingencies as possible have been quietly eliminated. So he makes no attempt to explain to himself why he is doing this reckless and conspicuous thing with the most wanted man in the city, here on a dimly lit back street with a three million dollar piece of ex-military technology kicked over and forgotten at their feet. 

Right now, his body is telling him to fuck Arthur against this wall as hard as they both can handle, and take the consequences, when they come, on the chin. Arthur, shoving out from the rough brick to grind their hips together, appears to be of the same mind. Of their own accord, Eames's hands slide down and back, skimming over the slender edges of Arthur's torso towards arse, but on the way he meets the obstacle of the M-77 tucked into Arthur's back. The unyielding bulk of the killing weapon seems huge against the trim span of Arthur's waist. It's an abrupt, unwelcome reminder of where they are, and why.

At the first sign of Eames's hesitation, Arthur turns motionless, breathing light and fast against Eames's jaw like a man steeling himself against an attack.

Eames says, hazily, "Look, not the most-"

"No." Arthur's wrenched out of his arms in an instant. In a single smooth movement, his connection to his PASIV like an elite sportsman with the faithful racquet tailored to the most precise gram to fit the balance of his body, he bends away, hooks his fingers in the handle, and puts two feet between them, going briskly down the alley. Very shortly after that, he has disappeared. 

Eames allows himself a long moment propped on his palm against the wall, getting his thoughts back into focus, before he picks his cap up off the ground and follows.

** 

By the time he gets back, the PASIV case has disappeared into its hiding spot behind the middle crate. Arthur has got his notebook open, very likely writing down the hard-won code. As Eames comes in he looks up once, composed, and apparently finds nothing out of the ordinary to hold his attention.

It's hardly new, the way he makes a point of quietly, persistently cutting Eames out of his sphere of contemplation. Usually Eames just finds something to needle him about until Arthur's forced to acknowledge his lowly presence, admit they're part of the same human race. But tonight, he can't seem to make a game of it. Fucking Cobb – liar and traitor and loose cannon that he was – got a smile out of Arthur as they had all come round on Saito's plane to a reality they had very nearly lost forever. A smile of pure, delighted affection. And all Arthur can spare for Eames, who worked _with_ him, who did every last thing he asked on that frontier bending extraction, all Eames gets is a kiss that turned out to be a big adrenalin-fuelled mistake, and now a level of indifference that is frosty even by Arthur's usual cool standards.

Eames dumps one of the slightly chilled beer cans he bought onto the cardboard box that serves as their pantry and cracks the other open. "Skip the debrief. That was bloody spectacular. I'm celebrating – you can go fuck yourself."

Arthur gives him a longer evaluating look. Puts down the notebook and lays his gun on top of his closed laptop. 

"Pass me that."

One-handed, Eames pulls the ring of the second can and passes it over. Arthur drinks maybe half of it in slow, continuous mouthfuls, the contractions of his throat irresistibly intimate to watch as his head tilts back. Skimming down to where the clean white cotton of his undershirt tucks into the snug fit of his waistband, Eames knows that, even though it's well on the other side of midnight, he won't be able to lie back on his mattress and sleep. At home after a triumph like this, the whole team would be drinking themselves into the floor of the Pointe-Rouge house, speakers turned up high enough to make the bottles on the coffee table shiver while they rehashed the job's successes into single-malt-tinged mythology. Now, he's jangly with unacknowledged success and unfulfilled promise. He wants more from Arthur, and doesn't mean to let the night end until he's got it, in some form or another. 

He folds back the mosquito net over the higher bed – Arthur's – sits on the edge and leans back on his elbows. The pose is anything but subtle, showing off the hard hours he puts in at the gym between jobs. It gets him, for the first time, Arthur's undivided attention.

"You're on my bed, Mr Eames."

It used to get under his skin the way Arthur called him that at unexpected moments – him and no-one else, like he was the problem student and Arthur his beleaguered teacher. Now it just makes him feel short-changed.

"Can't fault your powers of observation there. Top notch. I'll just hop on the next plane home, shall I, if you've got this gig under control?"

Arthur breathes out a mouthful of gas and takes another few meditative sips.

"Are you planning on staying there?"

The way he says it sounds, hesitantly, like an invitation. Eames finds himself grinning: suddenly smug, entitled, coasting on the promise of success. "Yeah I am, as it happens. Problem?"

"As it happens," Arthur tells him, the repetition of Eames's phrase taking a more seductive turn in his smooth, no-nonsense accent. He drains the last of the can and discards it as he gets his first knee onto the bed. "No."

A moment later, he's straddling Eames's thighs. Then he's pushing Eames's shirt up, his spine bending easily to let him plant unhurried kisses on Eames's sternum, above the stitches at the base of his ribs, on each nipple in turn, running a leisurely, ticklish path through his hair as he passes. This is going to be good, Eames thinks. Slow and unexpected, different from how it's gone before. Arthur's mouthing inside the collar of his shirt, teeth scraping at the muscle despite the way they're both bathed in sweat from a tense night's work. Eames presses his thigh up gently, to make sure he's got every last bit of Arthur's attention wrapped up in this, no scrap of intellect roaming free towards rival thoughts. That gets him a nice, long stretch of Arthur grinding down against him; Eames watches the wave of movement passing through all the neat, balanced joins of his spine and hips. His breath on Eames's jaw smells beery, male and easy. 

"I liked your work tonight," Arthur says, lightly kissing the corner of his mouth, the bow of his top lip, a move he hasn't used before. "In case I wasn't clear on that already."

And just like that, Eames doesn't want slow and unexpected anymore. 

He's the one grabbing at the back of Arthur's shirt, fighting the cling of sweat to drag it off him. He's the one groping his way down Arthur's chest with his palms glued to the high, muscled curve of pectorals like he'd never touched naked flesh before. And Arthur – never-give-an-inch Arthur, stand-offish on every job before this one from the razor seams of his suits to the reflective gloss of his boots and his hair – Arthur just crushes Eames's hips between his knees, and lets him. 

"Give me a moment," Arthur says breathlessly, with a hint of the dimples that would get him out of all kinds of trouble if he only bothered to learn how to use them to advantage. "This is going to go a bit differently if you're about to start participating." 

And yeah, there's probably resentment under that, but Eames is too distracted to answer it any other way than rolling his hips up into the bone and sinew of Arthur's splayed legs, starting to rub himself properly hard. Arthur pushes back without hesitation, setting the rhythm, shuffling forward to line them up better. 

Just below the waist of his top-of-the-range professional travelling trousers, Arthur's thickening arousal is stretching the fine weave, angled up towards the left hip and still giving a little under the pressure of Eames's touch. Eames traces the swell of it with his thumb, stops near the point where the crown gathers in from the shaft, just to feel the heat and responsive shudder all the way through two layers. He traces the same path again with the back of his knuckles, and that's all it takes before Arthur is jerking open his button, unzipping and lifting himself free of his pants. Eames's mouth goes dry watching him work the full length of his cock in impatient tugs until it's slick and rigid. Eames has reached out before he's even conscious of how badly he wants to touch.

Guys like his hands – it's the one thing all the men he's let proposition him in clubs have had in common, the twinks who want to be shoved face first into the wall, and the steroid junkies in clinging vests who settle for a jerk off when they work out he's got no interest in getting down on his knees for them. Arthur's shudder goes right through his stomach muscles, up the sides of his rib cage. 

Arthur leans forward to prop himself on one palm beside Eames's head, so that he can raise his hips enough to loosen the strained fabric across his crotch and let Eames get both hands on him. He curls fingers under Arthur's balls and squeezes them in the fold of his palm while fingertips play lightly over the hot, damp skin behind. Arthur's shoulders shake, as if the arm holding him up were about to fail. Eames really wants it to. He can't get enough of the unexpectedly addictive sounds Arthur makes when he's losing it. There's a stifled murmur, a groan through gritted teeth – responses Eames had never extracted from him before. The breath he holds when Eames spreads out his fingers for a broader grip comes out in a needy gush the moment Eames starts to stroke in earnest.

He jerks Arthur off greedily, without mercy, rougher than he'd normally start off with, and watches the sweat break out on the flushed skin of Arthur's brow and bleed down into the dishevelled curls of his hair as he takes every last brutal tug of it and arches in for more. His eyes lose focus, skittering over Eames's face, closing in a tortured frown, and that's too tempting. Eames picks up the pace, never missing a stroke, and a moment later Arthur's slick and pulsing in his hand, spilling for a frantic, short time. 

For a good while after he comes, he just stays there, eyes closed while his lungs try to catch up on a lot of missed breath. Eames swipes the pads of his fingers over Arthur's forehead, soft and slick with sweat, pushing aside the mussed up tumble of his hair. It's damp too, feverish. He still hasn't opened his eyes. So Eames presses himself up, curling into the awkward angle, and kisses the swollen curve of his bottom lip.

Arthur's murmur sounds very far away, lips moving very faintly against Eames's, following the kiss for a moment as he sinks back down. His weight is clumsy with impending sleep, ill-disciplined, heavier than he usually lets himself be. It takes him a good long while to roll onto his elbow and free up his hand to return the favour.

Arthur strokes him, slowly, curiously. He spits directly onto Eames's shaft, the feel of it cool until his strokes start to work it in. Then he does something new. He slides off the bed so he can bend right down and, never loosening his firm four-fingered grip, licks across the domed head of Eames's cock, where Eames would swear he can feel the texture of each individual taste bud teasing the sensitised skin. And this – the sight of Arthur wetting his tongue in his mouth and licking with gentle, dedicated persistence as if the taste of Eames's cock was everything he needed in the world – this is something that, back in the Metropole days, he couldn't have hit on the vocabulary to ask for, even if he'd known how badly he wanted it.

Eames lies back on the meagre give of the bed – four centimetres of foam over a creaky old metal mesh base – and tries to play it cool. The underside of the ceiling is overlapping sheets of corrugated iron over two slightly skewed timber trusses. There are rust marks around a coin-sized hole in the corner above the crates, where the rain obviously comes in. Arthur is going slow – not teasing, not making a point, just working with the same leisurely, constant squeeze and pull of his fist and the occasional electric touch of his tongue, his lips. This one surreal night leaves all the sexual luxuries of the Metropole in the shade. Who would have thought it was such a powerful aphrodisiac, the knowledge that every time Arthur's tongue grazes slow and languishing over his slit, it's because he wants the taste, wants the responsive twitch of Eames's flesh in his hand. With his eyes drifting closed, he can reach down blind to skim the contours of Arthur's ear, moving over his cheekbone as he finally leans in to take Eames's cock properly into his mouth.

It's the kind of orgasm that creeps up like a ten-metre fuse and blows all his senses to bits. The lovely, excruciating certainty of it builds in his nerves for a long time before it hits him. Arthur's strokes get fractionally faster, his business-like grip never failing. Eames wants to tell him to speed up, slow down, more spit, rougher, looser, and to keep going all night, just like that, please – but instead he lets the pleasure carry him away, Arthur's hand perfectly tight around him as he comes. 

Dimly aware of Arthur digging round among the sheets for a stray piece of clothing to wipe off on, he's much more vividly aware of not wanting to be moved off and forgotten like a checkbox on one of Arthur's stupendous mental task lists. 

The bed's a single, treacherous on the edges where the mattress overhangs the base. He hitches himself onto his side and stays defiantly still while Arthur waits for him to shift back into his own bed. But though he may be washed out with pleasure for the time being, he's greedy for more, and knows he has only one night to get it. As soon as he can get it up again, he's going to want Arthur in arm's reach.

Eventually, Arthur kills the light, pulls the mosquito net down and lies down on his back beside him, with a long breath of pure irritation. Eames recognises the sentiment foggily, the connections between action and interpretation already getting hazy as his body's rhythms fall into the stupor of sleep, more endorphins in his veins than blood. His jaw tucks in above Arthur's shoulder in a neat fit that pleases him unexpectedly. Eyes too heavy to open, he finds Arthur's neck by touch, skims over his chin to lay his fingers over his critical, chastising mouth. They went to a whole new level tonight. Their work synchronised like the best teams in the world can only dream of. Damned if he's going to let Arthur breathe a word of disagreement or doubt.

**

The all-night marathon never happens. The next time Eames is aware of anything, it's that morning has become well advanced, to the hour where keen summer sun on the iron roof turns into a radiating waterfall of heat, and he is painfully hot in every sweaty place his body is pressed against Arthur's. All night, they haven't moved – not that the narrow bed gave them anywhere much to go – and he wakes up with his forehead nestled against Arthur's hair and the whole front of him bathed in sticky heat from Arthur's side. A grinder screeches into action in the auto repair downstairs, as if to underline what kind of fairytale daze he must have been in to have slept through since its eight a.m. opening. He shifts his hand palm-down over Arthur's stomach, thinks about sliding it lower and seeing where that takes them. But he needs to take a piss, and he's uncomfortably hot everywhere their skin connects, heart straining with it.

When he comes back upstairs, Arthur is covered to the waist by the bedsheet he must have retrieved. His nakedness looks different by day, the textures of skin and musculature and the healthy, product-free sheen of his hair are all more distinct without the artificial brightness of electric lighting. Eames looks for the laptop that so often goes up like a shield between them whenever a difference of opinion gets terse or conversation runs dry, but it hasn't moved from Arthur's bag. 

"Put on some clothes next time," Arthur says dryly, letting his gaze descend to emphasise his point. "Think of the guys down there working with sharp implements."

On Arthur, the lack of professional accoutrements in hand creates an incongruous air of leisure, as if he might be on a beach holiday with nothing to do but channel surf and lounge around in the limited wardrobe of hotel robe and neatly fitted swimming costume. If the stakes weren't so high, he thinks he'd like to throw a spanner in the job for a couple of days, roll around in this bed with Arthur until their bodies ache with it, until they've gone through every possible position enough times not to want any more. He'd like to fuck this thing out of his system completely. 

"Actually, I wasn't thinking of them at all," he replies instead, mind still too foggy to be anything but honest, and reaches for the tail end of the sheet. He reels it in, eyes following the contours as it slithers over Arthur's thighs, clears his knees, traces over the peaks of his toes to be dropped back onto the floor. In a tiny, devastating movement, Arthur shifts his legs infinitesimally further apart and, just like that, Eames's body goes from curious interest to full throttle as the sheet slips out of his grip entirely. 

It's dangerous to do this in broad daylight, he thinks distantly, with all his senses at their most finely honed and the all-pervasive heat telling his sub-conscious he's on holiday. He's half way up the mattress when Arthur reaches for him, pulls him in with a determined grip, deliciously naked as Eames settles over him. He's going to do it slower this time. See if he can make Arthur writhe a little for him. Just under Arthur's jaw, where the flesh is tender, seems like the perfect place to wedge his mouth and suck. Under his hip, Arthur starts to get hard, then eager, then wet. He pretends to misunderstand the fingers that stroke the side of his face, and turns his head to take two of them in his mouth.

"Mr Eames," Arthur murmurs in his ear in a new voice – soft, honeyed teasing over his usual inflexible determination. "Put your goddamn smirking, insufferable mouth to work and do the job properly."

The warmth in the words – the exact polar opposite of the flinty grim temper he wears in a dream level when he's carrying the whole team on his shoulders – makes Eames light-headed. It's the humour that seems intimate, even with all the naked flesh between them.

"Settle down," Eames grins into his neck, biting, impulsive. "Everything in the proper order, Arthur. My insufferable goddamn mouth is otherwise engaged at present."

But in a few moments he's doing it anyway – he shuffles down the bed and tilts Arthur's cock up from his belly and slides his mouth around it. And okay, it's not something he's done a lot, but he's been learning fast since this arrangement of theirs began. He does know how just the spectacle of someone keen to do it can get a man three quarters of the way there, so he makes a show of it, his mouth wet and loose and filthy as he pulls back right to the tip, runs his tongue over the head while Arthur says _"Jesus"_ just the once in a strangled kind of voice. Arthur's moving under him, and that's an erotic sight on its own, all that lean, disciplined muscle squirming into the mattress like he can't bear waiting for Eames's mouth to finish him. He slides his hands up over Arthur's stomach, holds him down while he sucks slow and firm and feels for the jolt of his abdominals clenching and letting go when it's good, when it's so good it's too much. 

It's hard on the cheeks after a while, makes the hinge of his jaw ache in a way he's not used to, and yet it's hot as hell, the pleasure of breaking his own rules and all that vulnerable flesh between his teeth. He always thought taking a dick in your mouth must be kind of belittling, until the first time he had it done to him by a six-foot getaway driver with prison tatts that made him look dangerous enough to bite. He sucks fast and loud to make up for the shallow depth and doesn't make any attempt to go gently with his hand. 

He's got a lot more familiar with how Arthur moves when he's losing it, as compared to the stillness and compounded tension that signifies his displeasure or impatience. The writhing down his torso turns from encouraging to desperate, though his open mouth makes no sound. They're good together, he thinks. They found a space where they work well together. 

"Eames-"

The syllable breaks upwards, a sound Arthur never makes even with three dream bullets in him. Arthur's fingers fumble in his hair which is perhaps supposed to be a warning. Eames sucks him down and lets him finish, sucks until he starts to go still. 

"This," Arthur says a bit later, while he's stroking Eames off, or more accurately, holding his beautiful fingers in a perfectly tight, unfaltering loop while Eames thrusts into them. "Tell me this isn't all steroids."

He spreads his free hand over one pectoral, bulky from where Eames is propping his own weight on arms and shoulders, and squeezes experimentally, brushing Eames's nipple with his thumb until he gets the reaction he wants. 

"You think I go for the easy way, do you?"

Arthur just lapses back into that had-won, lovely smile as he traces the ridge of Eames's collarbone and then down over his bicep. 

"You like to make it look easy, sure."

Balancing on one arm, Eames drags his fingertips through the anticipatory drops that Arthur's firm grip is wringing out of him as he gets more intent. Arthur makes a face like Eames has got to be kidding, but then he leans up and sucks it off his fingers anyway, meeting Eames's gaze all the while as he swipes luxuriantly with his tongue. And that image is what plays in Eames's mind as he bends his head down, close enough to feel the throb of Arthur's pulse under the tip of his nose, and closes his eyes, and comes. 

**

The first job they worked, three before Fischer, was the one where Eames hinted to their auburn haired, clever chemist that Arthur had cut his teeth extracting for Uday Hussein's secret police, purely and solely because of the way Arthur flirted with her. Around women – and especially the profoundly competent and adventurous women who endure in extraction – Arthur hits his easy, unaffected best. The polar opposite of the tight handshake he'd bestowed upon meeting Eames, in between the pointed glance down his resort-issue shorts and his dismissive return to hooking the PASIV up to its recharger, it had struck Eames as an artfully pulled con. Something about the ease with which he would lean over Renata's shoulder to tap the screen of her laptop, advancing the latest skirmish in their good natured theoretical debate, added to his all-round pursuit of excellence, had made it obvious that Arthur had all the sex he needed, whenever and however he wanted it, just by crossing the line from friendship to romance. 

Now he's not so certain. There hasn't been any lightly delivered innuendo between them, no teasing smiles, no stray touches despite their constant close quarters. But now here is highly-strung Arthur, rumpled and mouth-marked, coming back to bed with a fresh litre bottle of water and settling against Eames's shoulder as if they were honeymooners used to living in a complete absence of personal space.

"I went to a sauna once on Lake Baikal," Arthur tells him after a while, swigging from the bottle. "Inside, it's just like this. Maybe a couple degrees cooler. Then you walk out the door and jump straight in the lake water. It's the deepest lake in the world, only gets above ten degrees on your scale in the height of summer. Ten motherfucking degrees." He lets out a deep, tired breath, full of the discomfort of unfamiliar heat, the long time between safe havens, and the stealthy, accumulating poison of unremitting stress.

Eames thinks of how it felt having Arthur's hands on him during that out-of-character impromptu back massage two days ago, how his whole body had reacted to it like the numbing warmth of several quick vodka shots spreading profound physical contentment through his veins. The luxury of human touch had made the frustrations and dangers of the job tiny, conquerable, hypothetical. He intends to go back to Marseille cloaked in the glow of an against-all-odds success, not having to spin some vague half-truths about the grisly manner of Arthur's death, and to do that, he needs Arthur at his brilliant best. He reaches around Arthur's shoulders, rubs the back of them, slides his fingers up the back of Arthur's head to the crown where he squeezes gently. He can't see Arthur's face but, after a few suspicious moments, there's no mistaking the way he relaxes, pulse dropping back, leaning into Eames's body.

**

Some time later, he calls his contact in Goma and finally gets the confirmation he needs. Katanga is supervising ore collections in villages along the Ituri River, taking his generous cut from the _negociants_ in return for letting the villagers who dig up his minerals keep their houses standing and their limbs intact.

"You're going to do it like this?" Arthur frowns from where he's getting his shirt right-side-out to make the short trip to the bathroom and wash himself into the blank slate on which he'll build his health and safety alias.

It hadn't occurred to Eames not to make the next call, the last remaining variable in their plan, from the end of the bed, stark naked. The gritty, sticky state of him, unashamed smell of sex everywhere, might, if anything, help him get into Daniel Katanga's skin. To a man like that, shame is an emotion for followers, not for the hard men born to lead them.

"There is an easy way and a hard way, my friend," Eames says, just as Katanga had said to him, teeth gleaming like the gold rim of his sunglasses, the one time they had met waiting for a charter flight to Kinshasa. "They chose the hard way."

He repeats it a few times more as he fits in the new sim, getting his mouth comfortable with the depth of pitch and the accent. 

Amundsen's direct number answers on a couple of rings. 

"It is again time that we do business together, my friend," Eames tells him without any introduction. "When do we meet?"

Under Amundsen's hesitation, he will be narrowing down the handful of black market contacts and militia men with the swagger to talk to him in this way, trying to place the voice, and knowing that, whatever the caller's name is, he can't risk it being said down an office phone line. 

"Your timing is bad. We're not in the market for new business. Try again-"

"Thirteen hours in the boat," Eames interrupts before he can hang up. "And a tyre break on the runway in Kampala. The time is now. It is a need most urgent."

He gives Amundsen a chance to map out that route in reverse, work out the most likely points of origin. Katanga's been on Cobol's books from time to time – he said as much to Eames, to establish his credentials as an international player. In between he's switched allegiances between whichever of the local or Ugandan backed Hema militias needed his brutal brand of services. That most of his paycheques were coming from Amundsen had been an educated guess, until confirmed now by the quality of Amundsen's silence. 

"I'll come to you. Where are you staying?" Amundsen asks in a voice that is pretty casual for someone who's probably pulling up Worner's number as he speaks, ready to have the inconvenient Katanga eliminated as soon as his location can be gleaned. 

"Close, I am close." Eames lets a broad smile show in his voice. "We take lunch together. Men of business. Fish with cream sauce. One hour."

"That's impossible."

Eames scratches his armpit, starting to enjoy himself, while he lets Amundsen sweat, perhaps contemplating the excuses he would have to invent to get out of the weekly video conference with Head Office at 9a.m. Brussels time. 

"Impossible?"

"Out of the question."

Eames gets purposeful, letting the big man of the jungle drop his civilised performance, menace coming through the smile. "Or I come to you."

"I can make time at dinner. The Imperial."

"Excellent," Eames beams, while in the corner of his eye Arthur takes a step towards him, as if Eames might have clean forgotten that it's late afternoon they need Amundsen out of his office, not evening. "Three courses. Before, I have other meetings."

In his mind, Eames's Katanga is on the terrace of the Yacht Club, letting himself be distracted by a silver platter of scones on its way past. He waits out the silence, still smiling, reaches down to swat a ticklish fly off his ankle.

"I'll take you to your meetings myself," snaps Amundsen, his dangerous expression audible over the phone. No matter what, he can't have Katanga wandering around the city, a human link to massacres up and down the mineral rich lengths of the Ituri and Amundsen's personal fingerprint on the bloody cargos of tantalite that came out of them. "In the company car. DVD player. Internet. I'll pick you up at five."

"Four. At the Yacht Club. I wait for you."

He rings off before Amundsen can divert them to an out-of-the-way meeting point to which he could dispatch Worner without coming in person. 

Eames has more than a bit of Katanga's brazen self-worship left in him as he snaps the sim, chucks the empty phone on the mattress on the floor, and lies back with his hands behind his head, all while Arthur remains standing in the middle of the room with his shirt still dangling from one hand. 

"The answer to your earlier question," Eames says, mostly in his own voice, "is yes, I am. And if you know anyone who could do it better with their clothes on, go ahead and call them in."

Two of Arthur's efficient strides bring him back onto the bed, fingers clutching Eames's thigh before travelling quickly up his body, brushing the lax length of his cock with two electric fingers only to flatten out for maximum contact as he gropes one side of his chest and then the other. And yeah, in Katanga's headspace or his own, it doesn't do his ego any harm to see how Arthur makes no effort at all to hide what he wants. 

Eames laughs – all his own – and drags him down. Their limbs slide together, sweat-slick and only getting worse as they buck against each other. The back of Arthur's neck is practically wet with it as Eames holds him close and bares his throat for the touch of teeth. It's hard enough to think in this hot room without the added distraction of the way Arthur is in motion everywhere they touch: hips rutting, mouth biting, and his gun hand squeezing Eames's upper arm like the vulnerable curve of a breast. Arthur's jaw opens wide over the meat of the muscle, hungry, in a way no-one has done to him before who wasn't doing it to establish some stupid point about dominance. And Eames has that sense again of uncharted territory – of how much he has left to find about what they can be like together. 

He snakes his arm around Arthur's waist and meets him thrust for thrust, and thinks he should have started this thing early enough for them to have fucked right through the first addictive, obsessive madness of it, or never started it at all.

"The phone call went well," Eames informs him afterwards, once his head has cleared.

"Yes, I gathered," Arthur replies, lips curving into a smile Eames can feel scraping the bristles of his cheek. 

"He's worried enough to show his face. He won't breathe a word until he knows what Katanga's got to offer. Won't risk letting anyone get their hands on a piece of history they could hold over him – certainly not a ruthless piece of bastardry like Worner."

All he gets for a reply is a vaguely affirmative vibration against his jaw, as if Amundsen and the industrial behemoth he works for were on the other side of the world.

In the satiated, lazy hush that follows, it takes a while to notice what's changed. The clang and screech of tools in the workshop downstairs has fallen quiet. It's lunch break already. 

**

Arthur, Eames thinks as watches him dress a little later, is different from the body types of Eames's world. There, the men are either broad and heavy, thick with defensive muscle and built like a fortress, or the hair-trigger, nervy type that seems to take in nutrition only through the end of a cigarette. Arthur's something else. He's neatly functional, as if he could have designed himself to carry only the muscle he needed, nothing spare. 

And yeah, Eames has seen all of his human frailties now, has learned how he smells after a day of too much stress and no air-conditioning, but as soon as his crisp blue shirt goes on, that knowledge seems ridiculous. When Eames looks up from giving Arthur's spectacles a good rub with a dirty scrap of rag to scourge the shop-new sheen off them, the man he's got to know over the last week has vanished completely. The stray curls are smoothed away and his fingers scrubbed clean of absent-minded licks of pen. He looks like he would on any other job: fiercely focused, impeccably prepared, and ready to tear shreds off any team member who can't meet the same standard.

"You're supposed to have come overland from Nairobi, are you?" Eames says critically before he can stop himself.

When the only response he gets is a frown, he dampens his hands from Arthur's water bottle and scrunches up his shirt under the arms and down the back until it looks a bit more lived in. Arthur lets himself be manhandled, stiffly permits the invasion of his personal space, only pulling away when Eames's hand settles flat over the small of his back where it fits all too well against the narrow span of him.

"The delivery schedule's checked, I take it?" he says in a combination of superiority and irritation that Eames has not heard for so long that it takes him a moment to remember it doesn't belong to Arthur's alias. 

**

By two, Arthur has lost the charge of irritation and come back to a tense, uncomfortable stillness. Since returning from his final visit to Dorphine's diner with Emmanuel's all-clear message, Eames has quizzed him six times on his alias's qualifications and history, on mining industry safety and ISO 12100, and failed to trip him up once. On any normal job, this is where Arthur would be making the greatest nuisance of himself, checking that every team member had their prep at 100% and their schedule drilled down into their DNA. But today, with only the two of them and Eames's part all but played already, he's standing at the open window that looks over the little yard behind the auto repair shop, afternoon heat making his shirt cling to his lower back. 

"The security code for the warehouse in Pigalle," Arthur demands out of the blue. "What was it?"

Eames only has to think for a moment. 

"Good," Arthur says, and tells him another number which, if it's what Eames guesses, belongs to a location somewhere around the north Atlantic coast. "Repeat it back to me," Arthur orders.

There's a clench of anxiety under Eames's skin, as if he might prefer not to have heard.

"Reason I need to know this?"

Arthur gives the yard a last critical glance and turns back, leaning on the wall.

"In case it all goes wrong. Someone needs to tell my parents. "

Fantastic, Eames thinks. Despite his status as hero, mentor and unchallengeable best friend, Cobb yet again dodges the unpleasant tasks, ceding to Eames the privilege of informing Arthur's next of kin where they can retrieve what Cobol has left of his body.

"One call," Arthur presses, watching him. "It won't be a big deal. They won't be all that surprised."

Eames wonders which bit they won't be surprised about.

"And don't weasel out and get Dom to do it. He'll spin them some romantic bullshit that'll only make it worse."

How infuriatingly like Arthur to extend his over-bearingness even beyond the grave; to trust Eames with this without quite trusting him to do it right.

"All right. What do you want me to tell them?"

"Mining accident," Arthur says, straight. "No body recovered. They're not stupid, Eames. They'll know."

Eames reaches for the last cola can he'd brought back from the morning's errand and holds the metal against his neck. Already, it's barely cooler than room temperature – but he likes the smooth bulk of it against his jugular, gently compressing the artery. 

"It's time we got moving," Arthur says before he has a chance to drink it.

**


	5. Black Skies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's the business end of the job, but not quite business as usual for Eames.

The front gates of the Cobol plant are reinforced with enough steel to build two or three of their prime movers, management being well aware that only distance from the city centre and lack of ready means of mass transport spared them the brunt of the post-election riots a few years back. The gates stand open by day, though heavily guarded. On the opposite side of the road, amongst the cluster of lean-to stalls that sell fruit and doughnuts and smokes to the workers as they come and go, Eames stands in the narrow shade of an uneven iron roof and drags slowly on a cigarette to fit in. Half past three has just gone by when the boom gates rise up and a black sedan with a lone occupant crawls out. A glimpse of angular jaw identifies Amundsen behind the wheel. Eames turns his back on the road to send off the text that will bring Arthur and his hired driver out from their concealed side-track, as soon as the Cobol car has gone past. 

A foreign worker, engineer by the slouchy shirt and relative pallor, vacates one of the two plastic chairs beside the tea stall, so Eames slips into it. When he catches his fingers tapping out a quick rhythm on the steaming styrofoam cup, he stills them. There it is, the live-or die tension priming his nerves to do whatever he needs to see the job through. Body and mind doing precisely what they should. He could be easing himself down from a jemmied security window with his dad or Charlie behind him and a pouch of uncut diamonds strapped to his back.

He glances at the empty road, thinks of the other side of this. He knows now that moments of professional triumph are Arthur's vulnerability, that in the thrill of success he confuses the technical with the personal and loosens the locks on all his physical doors. Eames plans to take advantage of that moment to arrange for them to meet up afterwards at one of the flexible list of locations he's drawing up in his mind. He allows himself a moment to indulge in the image of Arthur in a plush hotel in New York, with a king-sized bed and a huge walk-in shower and a few days of no distractions; and in the certainty of walking away, satisfied, after. 

At the clack of a car door closing, he looks up to see Arthur handing his forged ID to the guards at the gate. Just as Eames coached him to, he adjusts his unfamiliar spectacles with the air of a long-standing tic, cultivating the right level of curiosity and calculated competence for a professional scouting out a challenging new workplace. Eames watches him with the attention he deserves, as a point man whose best and most critical work has, until now, always been performed out of sight, beyond the scope of gratitude or praise. The car draws into the internal parking lot and Arthur strides forward to where Emmanuel is coming over from the office block to meet him. They shift trajectory and move together towards B Furnace, veering out of sight behind the plant walls.

He'd make a fine straight man on a con, Eames thinks, if someone trained him to recognise his strengths and play them up instead of using all his formidable energy to keep them hidden. If you stripped off his history and all that hard-arsed professional bluster, the raw material left to work with would be the hesitant charm that worked its magic on Miriam, his trademark dependability, and a well-heeled propriety that goes right down to the marrow. And, as Eames has only recently earned the privilege of experiencing first hand, to the few people upon whom he bestows his trust, he's got that smile that's like shutters thrown wide open. 

His watch reads 3:50 as he finishes his tea. Time to get back on the borrowed eighties Yamaha that brought him here and make sure that Emmanuel's grandson drops off the note for Amundsen at the Yacht Club like they arranged. Inside, Arthur will be in his element, showing off all his carefully researched knowledge about blast furnaces. He chucks a few thousand shillings on the counter. If he did bring Arthur into the family trade, the pay-off would be the switch that's been such a pleasure on this job: Eames on his home turf showing Arthur the ropes. There's something a bit sexy about humility on a man like Arthur. 

He's just standing up when the air jolts. He feels it in his ear drums as much as hears it – an industrial scale explosion, far too loud to belong to a truck or a dumped load of coal. Before the shock has passed, there's a smaller explosion. The rattling of the tea urn and the legs of the fold-up table fades into the unnatural quiet that follows. 

The plant looks the same, but a moment later a cloud of smoke drifts into the space between the open gates, dark grey against the regular white steam, and starts to rise over the wall. Safety alarms scream into action inside. He whips off his sunglasses. The smoke looks to be coming from one of the furnaces, or both. 

This was not in the plan – not even in any of the desperation contingencies Arthur had sketched out. The smoke billows up. It's like the suffocating, sapping panic of Charlie's mate's car grinding to a useless halt 200 metres into their getaway. It's like getting that text from Reggie that said his dad had got twelve months non-parole. It can't be happening. 

The tea vendor nods to Eames's empty cup, prompting for a refill. As Eames knows from Arthur's meticulous spreadsheets, safety scares at the plant aren't uncommon, but neither are they regular enough to explain the man's level of disinterest. Even if he has less riding on what's inside those walls than Eames does, he should be shocked. The smoke continues to swell over the northern wall, and then it hits him, the smell of sulphur that confirms it's the blast furnace, B Furnace, that's been hit, not just the sintering plant. 

This is no accident. It wouldn't be the first time Cobol has wiped someone out under the guise of a machinery malfunction, but right now, under the international spotlight, they have every reason to stick to less conspicuous methods. The smart money is on sabotage – all it would have taken is one misdirected memo about the American safety expert sent in by head office and the opportunity for the disaffected workforce to make a point is ... is so blindingly obvious that Eames wants to smack himself. 

In a burst of angry shouting, a guard jogs out of the gates, gesturing menacingly back into the plant yard with his rifle. The delivery truck from the Coke plant brakes sharply with its front wheels on the road outside, pauses long enough for the guard to take aim at the driver side windscreen, then cautiously backtracks. 

Eames knows the drill here. What happens next is full lockdown. Gates shut tight and every person on site lined up and accounted for. Then will come the sullen queue of suspects waiting for their turn in whatever back room Worner has commandeered for his interviews. No-one leaves until Worner is satisfied. Eames glances at his watch. Amundsen will be back in forty minutes; more like twenty if someone thinks to call him and the roads are clear. 

The massive gates start to crawl closed. Arthur's smart. His alias will hold against every single person on that site, except Amundsen, the one person who met him in the flesh. His legs tense up to launch him towards the gates – at a flat-out sprint, he could get there in time to slip through – but he holds back. In his satchel he's got a wad of shillings, his last fresh sim, a gun, and a spare shirt.

The unwritten rules of the trade are clear on this. There is no obligation to put himself at risk to rescue a fellow thief. No-one expects it. No-one would even think to do it, unless it was a family member or someone who'd saved your life once, and neither of those applies to Arthur. Even if this catastrophe had been Eames's fault, a good thief takes an honest mistake in his stride. Every job is high stakes, meaning ordinary human errors can be fatal. If you can't be relied on, you'll never work another job, but it stops there. A team protects itself against fuck-ups by picking the best. It's only bare-faced treachery that merits retribution. Bad luck is just part of the landscape.

Part of the motherfucking landscape. The gates close, the last wisps of smoke rising up from where they have joined. If it were anyone but Amundsen with his deeply personal grudge. If his head of security were just the ordinary kind of brute. If this weren't Eames's own professional backyard – any other time, the rules of the trade would make his obligations clear. There must be upwards of fifty guns in the place, and at least a dozen men loyal or scared enough to use them at Worner's command. He has a shitty old pistol on the wrong side of the walls. Fuck it - if it were a competent one-job stranger trapped in there, he'd be halfway back to the city by now.

The lesson for him is in the terms of trade he set. If Arthur had gone about this the right way, asked Eames for a favour, offered him the job on cash terms like a man who had all the choices in the world, he could cut and run with a clear conscience in the knowledge he'd delivered his side of the deal. Instead, they've been living in each other's pockets for a week and a half, and all it takes is the briefest memory of last night for his body to work itself up in the first determined stirrings of arousal.

He lets the pistol fall back into his bag and draws out his phone instead, slots in the new sim and watches the smoke drift northwards as he waits for it to load. He knows how it will go, because on his first outside job for Cobol he extracted from a bloke who'd had a history with Worner, and what Worner's projection did in the mark's dream had made Eames's blood run cold. He will take Arthur for soft, as virtually everyone does on first meeting, and lead into the interrogation like a slow indulgence. And unless Arthur has an injury bad enough to cloud his judgment, he will recognise what Worner is and play along, give him some of the noise and terror he gets off on until, eventually, Worner will strike the limits of what Arthur is prepared to pretend. When he finds out that Arthur is worth breaking he will turn every vile method at his disposal towards doing it. As for Amundsen, he just likes to win, and since every cry he can wring out of Arthur will be a victory of a sort, he'll want to make it last. 

Yusuf answers the unfamiliar number guardedly and he snaps into action. "Here's the deal. You give me everything you know about Cobol – every illegal game they've got going, all your best intel, Kisumu especially. The price will be fair – we'll sort it out later, swear it, but fuck me over and you'll be dead in a week."

"Yeah not too bad, thanks. About time you got over yourself and called. Just back from Mauritius, actually, got a-"

"Don't muck about, mate. Matter of life and death. Just name your price."

It's a shame that Yusuf is wedded to the leisurely curiosity of experimental chemistry. When the stakes are high enough, his mind has the precise, deadly focus of a rifle, and his trade brings all sorts of secrets to his ear. The details come out as fast as Eames can scrawl them in the margins of the scrap of the Standard spread out over his thigh, and it's only going to cost him a third of Arthur's fee.

Hamid's mobile has been cut off and a receptionist at the office says he's somewhere in Spain or Portugal. He doesn't have a quick line to da Souza when he's on a job. He tries Opperman three times. He gets onto Tom Moorcock, the crooked EU parliamentarian who introduced him to Opperman after Eames and Reggie and Frank aced a stitch-up job for him on a troublesome investigative reporter. Moorcock's merely a pragmatist with a ruthless survival instinct. It takes a few reckless threats to get him to spill the name and address of the Saudi bankers through whom Cobol launder money intended for the pockets of friendly officials in Brussels, Geneva and London. He leaves a message with Alex, the family member least likely to hold it over him afterwards, to the effect that if they don't hear from him by Sunday, they can come knocking at Cobol's door and bring an empty sack.

As Opperman's number rings a fourth time, Eames shifts the phone to his left hand and rubs his damp right palm on his shirt. He knows Arthur too well, with a forger's exactitude for physical detail. Despite himself, he pictures the impact of a steel capped boot on Arthur's ribcage, battering the lean muscle that flexed so permissively under his hands a few hours back. Unwillingly, he knows what Arthur's mouth will look like after the impact of a fist; knows the grim set of his jaw as he forces himself not to make a sound. It's all too easy to draw up the image of that crisp blue shirt soaked down the front with blood.

"You've got a problem at your plant." He keeps his message blunt; Opperman appreciates the fine art of concision. "Make it a priority to get my man out of there. If I don't see him on the road in ten minutes, that ugly business in Bafwasende will be all over the evening news."

He allows two fruitless minutes for a call back. Then he sets off for the side exit they use when a spillage or a break-down blocks the main gate. The alarms are still blaring. The chemical smoke makes his eyes stream.

**

The side gate is less heavily fortified since the ditch running parallel to the wall, carved out by an offshoot of the river which supplies the plant's water, prevents a vehicle from approaching at any great speed. Through the bars, he can see two guards. One – an old hand, thankfully, capable of making his own judgments on how to apply his orders – looks familiar. Behind them, a water cart darts off towards the torn iron sheeting and 900 degree coals of A Furnace.

In the local Luo he can only manage enough small talk to establish himself as someone with a little time on the ground, then he mixes it up with the national lingua franca, Swahili, in which his time in Mombasa left him decently competent. 

Emergency response, he calls to them through the gate, adding in some English for the technical phrases. Leak containment, temporary vapour seal, neutralising agent. 

"No entry," the younger guard tells him, feet planted on the asphalt as if bracing for a fight. The gates are locked until further order.

Thank god for every one of those hours he spent grilling Arthur on sintering, reduction and by-products. Envelope breach at the condenser rotors, he goes on in a rapid stream of jargon. Sulphur trioxide scrubbers, fatality hazard, acid condensate, respiratory damage. "It can't wait. Orders of - " He makes a show of checking his phone to recall the name. "- Mr Beckers. Clear it with him if you need. Make it quick."

The guards know as well as Eames does that Beckers, the head of regional operations and most senior man on site, will be far too busy at a time like this to thank them for interrupting him with administrative trivia. The older guard gives a soft instruction to his colleague, who jogs off in the direction of the heart of the plant. 

"Both buildings, was it?" Eames asks, tracking the path of the disappearing man, because after all Beckers is the person he most wants to find, in order to trade his hastily assembled blackmail material for Arthur. "Better your job than theirs. It'll be a miracle if there's no-one dead."

He's got a sketchy list of the casualty figures (a lot of burns and shrapnel gashes, no confirmed deaths, but there's no way to know what's inside the mangled mess of A Furnace) when the first guard returns and, with a surly nod, wrenches back the manual bolt to let the gate slide back.

"Keep a lookout for my team, will you?" Eames tells them with an air of grave trust. "They're a few minutes behind. I'll need my equipment the minute they get here."

With a few brisk steps, he can take in the serious state of A Furnace, which looks like a beer can turned on its side and trodden down in the middle. Next to it, B Furnace is still spewing out smoke, but the damage seems to be high up, and all of the other buildings appear unscathed. In between the structures, the open ground is full of gathered groups of workers, emergency vehicles darting perilously in between them. 

Since Beckers seems like the sort of boss to get out in the thick of it, Eames makes for where the crowd is busiest. As he's rounding the corner of the lorry service yard, he has an instant to register the looming form of one of Worner's Congo men before something solid and metallic clocks him on the side of the head and he goes down.

**

The shed they lock him in has got a smooth concrete floor and no contents apart from a stack of bulging bags of garbage against the opposite wall. He's somewhere over by the office compound, he's pretty sure, though he wasn't at his most perceptive as he stumbled over here, hands bound with plastic tie behind him and his ears ringing louder than the last insistent alarms.

His first thought, struggling to sit up against the wall as his mind starts to clear, is that they've put him on an easy wash-down surface unlikely to retain incriminating traces, meaning it could be days before they throw his body into the blast furnace. His second thought, coming to him now as if knocked in by the blow he took, is that for all he knows Arthur is dead already. He could have charged in here for nothing, thinking with his dick like he hasn't done since he was Alex's age, when his dad had to call in every long-standing favour in his debt book to get him out of Albania that time he'd gone crazy about that arms dealer's sister and blustered into Tirana full of underworld swagger as if he'd inherited all the specialist expertise of the last two generations in his blood without the bother of having to acquire it through failure, through cracked ribs and broken fingers and retributory beatings that could have left him lame or blind. 

He tilts his head gingerly to assess the damage, and shift his train of thought. The open wound behind his temple is starting to clot. He tests the bindings on his wrists. There's a little give in them from the way he fought like a bastard while the guy who'd got him called someone over to hold him down so they could he truss him up, but the plastic cinches tight beneath the first joint of his thumb.

This isn't the first time he's been at the lip of this same abyss, with nothing but a thin plank made of pure luck between him and the grave. Labouring to his feet, he tells himself that he's going to walk back out that gate, whatever it takes. Bugger the plan, bugger their low profile, bugger who he has to kill to do it. If Arthur can move, he'll get him out too. If he can't, he'll have to threaten and bargain him out afterwards, no matter how many more contacts he has to set on fire to do it. And if he gets cornered, he'll find a way to lay hands on a gun and, like he's done dozens of times in a dream, he'll pull the trigger for good. 

He's scouting out the contents of the garbage bags when Worner's voice rises above the jumble of noise outside, issuing threats in three languages. No-one gets out. I shoot any man who leaves, and any man who lets him. Get your useless arse on the debris removal team.

Although it was da Souza who militarised him, in the preliminary high-level round before Eames got his introduction to the team, when the door opens he appears to recognise Eames on sight.

"I'd like a word with your boss," Eames tells him directly, bluffing in his best smug colonial hauteur. "About a little place in east Congo where eight people were taken away in a truck bought with Cobol money and never heard of again." 

At a nod from Worner, one of his guards takes an iron grip in Eames's shirt and shoves him out into the open space. The blaze in B Furnace has eased in the handful of minutes Eames was locked away. A shove from behind steers him towards it, dodging through crowds of workers on their way to or from the scene of the explosions. 

"Or there's the rather frank memos from Riyadh Investment & Commercial that will be on their way to the Foreign Corrupt Practices prosecutions team tomorrow morning," Eames continues. "Possibly he won't thank you for keeping him in the dark about that one." 

At that point his list of blackmail material derails when he sees Emmanuel approaching from B Furnace, accompanied by a man holding a bloodied jacket over his head to staunch what appear to be some pretty significant blast wounds. 

"Casualties report to security before first aid," Worner barks. 

It's then that something about the injured man's tight stride jags his attention, something that lacks the long-limbed ease he would expect. Eames glances down to see a familiar pair of shoes: imitation leather loafers, bought second-hand from a market stall in Kibuye and beaten with a hammer from the auto workshop downstairs to replicate the scuffing of a heavy-duty workplace.

You'd think he'd have learned by now to stop thinking of Arthur as a tender-skinned civilian blundering about in a mercenary world. Every day, he reminds himself, Arthur makes a choice between the comfortable legitimate life he could still go back to, and the dangers of their illicit, stop-start trade, and only something deeply wrong with him could make him persevere in the path he has chosen. It looks pretty certain that he's pressing on with the original plan and making for the office block – exploding buildings, on-site pandemonium, flesh wounds and all.

That changes everything. It's like the lifting of a paralysing weight. Arthur's taking care of himself; now all Eames needs to do is get out of this little jam and they can both go home.

The state of B Furnace draws his thoughts ahead to some extremely unpleasant places. A long, rectangular building supported by two rows of steel columns, its process line starts with the blast furnace against the left wall by the entrance, and makes a U-shape of thick uninsulated pipes passing through secondary separators and gas extraction tubes until it loops back to the final chambers on the right wall half-way back to the entrance, in which the zinc is condensed and poured into ingots. An explosion at the top of the blast furnace has peeled back the roof above it, detaching roof girders from their joints. Some of them are still dangling ominously overhead. Others have swung down onto the end of the process line, smashing up the pipework and releasing a vast, shallow pool of molten zinc which has burned into the brick floor and, despite the thin, matte crust starting to form on its surface, is still smoking threateningly at the edges. 

Eames glances from the metal sheets torn into knife-edges, to the metres upon metres of super-heated exposed metal. Sweat slicks his collar and his palms as gusts of heat parch the skin of his face.

There's a group of men here already, on their knees and bound as Eames is. George has got blood dripping from his mouth and ear, and a red mark the width of a bar across his cheek. He doesn't know the rest, and can't pick which of them is the most likely industrial terrorist. When Worner's guard pushes him, Eames goes down hard, pain shuddering behind his kneecaps. And that's when some unsuspected dial in Eames's head clicks from professional thoroughness into sheer testosterone-fuelled determination. He's going to bloody well buy Arthur his uninterrupted twenty minutes. 

He's going to have to let Worner break him a little first, he calculates as one of the guards gets out another length of blue plastic, passes it around the tie at his wrists, and tethers him from behind to the rail that fences in the blast furnace. His scalp stings from the radiating heat where a fallen girder has battered a hole in the furnace's brick cladding and exposed the red coals beneath. The metal rail is scorching; he holds his hands clear of it and guesses the plastic only has a few minutes before it gives. 

He's going to have to hold out that long, and then be in a fit state to get himself free, because he can't expect Arthur – unarmed, injured and inflexible Arthur – to mangle the plan and come back for him.

"I don't waste time with questions," Worner says in a tone that has no need of menace, picking up an iron bar from against the railing and hefting it. "When you start talking is up to you."

The first stroke hits him on the lower ribs; he tenses his muscles hard to absorb it, and lets the pain break through his expression before he conceals it. His fellow prisoners, recognising this for a preview of their near future, look elsewhere.

"Every minute-" Eames breaks off in a grunt under another blow, and another. "- we waste here, your boss Becker's missing his chance to get this under control."

Worner lands another blow in the same place, as if slowly chipping his way through to the ribcage, and Eames feels his muscles start to weaken, trembling, along with the swell and heat of broken tissue. Surely that's a minute or two. 

A glaze of calm has settled over Worner's pale eyes, as if he gets something soothing out of the rhythm of swinging the bar, or maybe as if he could transfer the stress of this chaotic afternoon via the medium of iron. Eames slouches forward, the bindings drawing his arms up behind him on an agonising angle. He lets the next blow jolt the breath out of him as if it had taken his muscles' last resistance with it.

"All right," he gasps.

Worner raises the bar again, and he wheezes, "All right, Jesus Christ, all right!"

It falls lower down this time, a half-centimetre short of fracturing his hip-bone.

"This is-" He has to grit his teeth and hold his breath to quell the pain, which is radiating across his pelvis and up his back like industrial needles going right through the flesh. "This is about the Ituri supply line is it? Your boss has rubbed some of the Goma big men the wrong way, trying to weasel out of his coltan orders."

With a long, unpleasant look, Worner gives his guards some orders in an unfamiliar Congolese dialect, and one of them drags George and another prisoner – the English speakers, no doubt – up off their knees and back out in the direction of the refuse shed. 

Worner trades his bar for one of the flat-edged rakes the men use for scraping the scum off the top of the molten ingots, and he holds it in the sluggish, still smoking zinc. Five minutes, Eames guesses. Time to turn on the storytelling, and make it the best of his life. If only his left-side abdominals didn't feel like an axe had gone into them.

He flinches involuntarily from the heat of the rake-head next to his cheek and opens his mouth.

"Look, this is not low-level dirt I've got. I'll give you everything I know, but if it's as good as I say, I want something in return. I get more, you pay me. We'll talk terms after."

He ducks away from where the rake lunges for his face. "Katanga." Over the blade of the stationary rake, he looks up at Worner, who's listening. "He offered me half a percent of takings if I get in here and find out your forward supply network. Him and three or four of his militia mates – don't know their names but I can find out for the right price. They want a contact they can use to go around you."

His story only has to hold for fourteen more minutes, so he embellishes it with any scandalous details that might keep Worner's attention. He works in as many of the Goma commanders as he can remember, the Saudi financiers, Tom Moorcock, some fictitious paramilitaries in Sudan, and a guy who ran amphetamines through Yusuf's dream den in Mombasa. Towards the end, he gets reluctant, lets the faintest note of withholding colour his voice, so that Worner has to climb up on the base of the blast furnace and reheat the rake in the exposed coals in order to extract the last of the story by threat of the brand.

"I'd be your man," Eames tells him, not shifting his gaze for a second off the smoking hot metal edge, centimetres from his top lip. "And you're in a sweet position right now to get me for a good price. So let's talk numbers."

When he comes to, blackness slowly clearing to reveal the outline of Worner's patient figure, his ears are nothing but ringing, like drills spinning right in his ear canal. The back of the rake has cracked or broken his cheekbone, judging by the stabbing pain around his left eye socket, and the momentary contact has seared his skin. The smell is revolting.

In Worner's hand is Eames's phone out of his satchel, with the last precious sim still in it bearing the record of his recent calls. Opperman. Yusuf. Alex. "Password," Worner demands. "No second chances."

Assuming he wasn't unconscious for long, he still has to string this out for a few more minutes. He twists his numb hands in their bindings behind him. He knows how much his body can take, and he's not there yet. But Cobol is not any kind of territory for weak men, and Worner's stock in trade is breaking the hardest of them at the first sign of disloyalty. 

Eames opens his mouth, spits out drool and blood, buys himself a few more seconds. He gives a number and watches Worner try it. When Worner gives the screen a look of grim satisfaction, he knows it won't be because the number worked. 

Down on one knee, Worner positions his gun with care, as if calculating with an anatomist's eye which of Eames's organs he wants his shot to tear through; whether or not to include the spine. Eames has never had a gut wound before. When his dad used to talk about the one he got on that Argentinian jewellery heist in the seventies, it never had the laughing bravado of his usual tall stories. He breathes out, makes his abdominals give up their futile protective clench, but it's shaky. Worner digs the muzzle into his skin through the shirt with a look that says in a very short time, he'll have everything he wants. 

"One moment, boss." Emmanuel is standing in the doorway. "The second floor security door has locked down. Something's gone wrong. I can't get to the staff records without a top level over-ride."

Furious, Worner turns to him as he reports, his distracted hand lowering the gun, and Eames is grateful, profoundly grateful, filled up with gratitude like a light shining from him or on him or in him, that it's Arthur who's sharing this predicament with him and no-one else. Arthur, who would take the unexpected hurdle of Eames's captivity in his stride, fuse the security door, and ad lib an excuse to send Emmanuel back here to check on him, to send him the blessing of a distraction. 

"Use the day list from Reception," Worner snaps.

"Can't do that. The paper copy is missing from the clip and the server link is down."

It might be the lingering disorientation of the blow to his head, but he loves Arthur, for a moment, there and then, with his bottomless competence and surprising flashes of creative genius. He's painfully, woozily fond of Emmanuel, too, as Worner beckons to one of his two remaining guards and crosses back towards the office block at a jog.

It takes him a minute or so, while the lone remaining guard is going around the handful of prisoners one by one to nudge them with his rifle and repeat a conversation that sounds to Eames like cold-hearted extortion, to shuffle along the bar he's tethered to until he reaches the end where it's been knocked loose from its strut. The noise of wreckage removal from outside masks the clang as he wrenches the bar free and liberates himself. 

He's scraped the plastic rope on his wrists down to one or two strands when Worner's return forces him to hoist his hands back up to the bar, resuming his awkward, submissive posture. 

"Let's go back to where we left off, shall we?" Worner smiles thinly.

Everything moves slowly after that. Details slot into order, arrayed around his goal. The gun is back in Worner's belt. He is two and a half steps away from Eames; it's another few steps to get to the guard, who's laid down his rifle to pull up the bottom of his shirt and wipe the itchy sweat from the super-heated room off his face. There are exposed coals spilling from the broken furnace behind him, torn metal to his left, and molten zinc in front. The rake lies against the rail by the bulky two-storey condenser. He can practically feel its pure iron weight in his hands. He runs through the precise, delicate sequence of movements that will put it there.

One of the prisoners calls out that he's got information. He meets Eames's eye around Worner's hip as Head of Security crosses to him; it's a fraction of a second but Eames sniffs the conspiracy, recognises a fellow criminal spirit, and guesses who the saboteur might be. He seizes his chance.

With nothing on his side except strength, surprise, and sheer will to live, he launches himself up and strains every muscle to gain traction as he surges forward, angling his shoulders as if on the rugby field. He catches Worner from the side; Worner plants his feet but Eames shoves him hard and levers every last ounce of force out of his trembling thighs. In a second, Worner concedes two steps, three and with a final push Eames has him tumbling over the girder and into the spill of molten zinc. 

There's a bizarre delay, between the moment Worner's hands and knees break through the crust on its surface, and the moment when he screams. Eames uses it to hook his bound wrists under the broken rail and tear them apart, heedless of whether it's the rope or his flesh that gives first. Three more steps. He snatches up the rake in his left hand, raises it to add the strength of his right, and brings it down across the head of the guard whose finger is still searching for the trigger. 

Taking a moment to check on Worner, who is swaying on all fours and clearly in no condition to go for his gun, he grabs his satchel and the phone off the floor. Slipping his glasses back on against the late afternoon sun, he wraps his spare shirt around his wrecked and bleeding right hand and crosses toward the office block. He makes that about eighteen minutes. 

**

There's a figure sliding down the wall onto the roof of the generator room – one of the many back-up plans should Arthur have trouble getting back out of Amundsen's office unobserved. Approaching, he watches Arthur leap up to the high window of the stationery store on the second floor and slither over the sill.

They meet at the bottom of the stairwell, which is thick enough with smoke to give him an unsettling flashback to the dream level they'd built for Mbote. Arthur nods to him, casual, inconspicuous, like two professional engineers conducing themselves level-headedly amid the mayhem. When they fall into step, it's with a satisfying synchronicity, as if the execution of the plan had gone perfectly from the first moment. 

"What the fuck were you playing at?" Arthur hisses, steering them towards the front gate. "Worner knows your face."

"Keep your shirt on. It's taken care of."

It's only then that he clocks the condition Arthur is in, behind his usual decisive stride. There are fine cuts on the side of his jaw and neck, a spider crack in the left lens of his glasses, a thin line of dried blood running from his hairline down into his collar, and the black jacket he's acquired from somewhere is showing wet, glossy patches down the right arm, as if he'd curled it up defensively against shrapnel in one of the blasts. There's an odd sort of desperation to his pace, too, that reminds Eames of a spinning top wholly dependent on velocity to stay upright.

"How the fuck do you call that quiet? A dead head of security. That's about as big a noise as you can get without actually shouting my name in the middle of the yard."

More stung than he should be, Eames offers, "Well, if you want to try the kiss of life, you've still got perhaps a minute or two before half a dozen workers finish him off." And then he can't stop himself adding bitterly, "And I do hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me, Arthur, for failing to grasp that my commission extended to constant surveillance of the ingress and egress of illicit explosive material intended for-"

The huge front gates are opening to allow the entry of a black sedan. Dust kicks up from its wheels, mingling pale brown with the grey smoke, as it spins into the compound. There's only one person it can be. 

"Right then," Eames says under his breath, as if daring the world to throw just one more disaster in his path. "Let's get you out of sight." 

When he hoists Arthur over his right shoulder, he only gets a moment's shocked resistance before some combination of practicality and trust kicks in. He veers them towards the first aid room, listing to the left in any case since his torn left abdominals are screaming already and everything depends on not blowing their cover by stumbling here and now. There's some real weight to Arthur, actually, far more than the light dexterity with which he carried himself in bed had let on. Eames grits his teeth and puts one unsteady foot in front of the other as Amundsen passes them by without a second glance.

Behind the cover of a mobile crane waiting its turn at the rubble of A Furnace, he sets Arthur down again, hunches over for a long moment as his smashed cheek sends a bolt of pain through the back of his skull that leaves him helpless, vision glittering away to nothing and slowly coming clear again. 

"Come on," Arthur orders without looking back.

As they take the long way around the inside of the walls back to the side gate he came in through, Eames has to work hard to match Arthur's pace. His feet and hands feel a long way from his body, and without Arthur's trajectory as a guide he's not sure he could walk straight. He clenches his fists and focuses himself. Later, he can have the luxury of physical shut-down, and anger and regret – later, he can call himself every synonym for idiot under the sun, rub his own nose in every single one of today's fuck-ups so as to be absolutely certain of never repeating them. But first he has to get out of here alive, and on that priority he has to train every ounce of concentration he has left – now, before the relief of the come-down and the endorphins from his injuries turn him into a useless wreck.

The car that brought Arthur here is parked in by a water truck and now Amundsen's hastily discarded vehicle, but the old Yamaha he left behind the stalls over the road will do the trick, if only they can escape the clutches of the lockdown. When he tells the guards at the east gate urgently that he has to get to where his team has broken down on the road, one of them openly laughs.

"No man in or out," they tell him, glancing pointedly at his injuries that in no way fit the profile of the hazard response specialist he'd come in as. 

Arthur's fingers closing like teeth on his forearm stay him in the act of reaching into his satchel.

"Don't even think about it," Arthur says, low and contemptuous, as if reprimanding a child for a disappointingly predictable transgression.

Eames – who would swear his half-thought-out plan had been to use the pistol as a visual incentive to the bribe he was about to offer and certainly not anything so stupidly counter-productive to Arthur's plan as shooting their way out – grabs his phone instead.

"Your attentive supervision is highly appreciated," he says as he moves them out of the guards' hearing. "But please be assured, I've found my way out of tighter corners than this one without your help."

The outright snarl gripping his mouth robs him of the smarmy provocative note he's usually got down pat. The Engelvin name stands for deft safe-cracking, smart thievery, and elegant, high-end embezzlement. Eames was brought up to know how to shoot for a light fitting, or a non-vital limb, rather than provoke the authorities with indiscriminate murder. He'd clearly been flattering himself if he'd imagined that the last week might have taught Arthur to think of him as something other than a low-life criminal thug.

His assets are this gun, Opperman, perhaps another hour of on-site mayhem, and, if he's willing to part with the entire remainder of Arthur's fee, Yusuf. His head feels like Worner beat it all over, getting worse by the second, and his ears still haven't stopped ringing. On a family job, there'd be Frank or his dad who'd been caught in every kind of hole through the decades and knew the way out. He remembers Frank on the Macau job directing them against their gut instincts through the ricocheting bullets and into the basement, _Down, keep going down, the front door's no good to us._

This time, there's only Arthur, saying with a bitter edge as though he'd found himself left in the lurch, "Go on then."

Undamaged by the day's events, Eames's phone lights up at a tap, and he scrolls through the recent numbers until he finds the Brussels area code. Arthur draws him further away from the guard post as it rings. 

This time, Opperman answers in person. "Just the man I wanted to speak to," he tells Eames in his usual tone of unruffled professional courtesy. "I trust events have calmed down a little since your last message. I always took you for a cool head in a crisis."

Eames focuses on the asphalt at his feet, pitted over the years since it was brand new. A blank surface to help him burn his bridges with a clear head. 

He says, "Here's the deal. You call the east gatehouse and give them the order to let my man out of there. Or I go to the Department of Justice team with recordings of every conversation we've had in the last week and a lot more than that. I've got the email ready to send right here. Make the call and I guarantee you'll never have to hear my name again."

The silence down the line sounds disappointed, despite the fact that Opperman will have decided before picking up the handset exactly what terms he was prepared to accept. 

"Circumstances being what they are," Eames adds in his gravest negotiating voice, "I can see my way clear to shaving my fee down to bare expenses. Plus ten percent."

"Oh no no." He picks up the faint note of amusement that tells him Opperman's going to give him what he needs, even if he has to trade in every last ounce of goodwill between them to get it. "Wouldn't hear of it. Do send me your invoice in full. I insist."

He hangs up without giving Eames the chance to thank him. A shame, as they both know this will be the last dealing between them, since no invoice will ever be sent or paid.

As the gate slides open, Arthur glances back toward the office block and the trail of destruction behind them. "We're clear," he says, but his terse tone implies that the state is very much temporary.

They take the sealed main road at the fastest speed they can get away with inconspicuously. Through Arthur's tight grasp around his middle, he can feel the quick heartbeat of a body under stress, worsening muscle tremors, and that worries him because he'll soon be too shaky, himself, to keep the bike steady, and he'd be happier if he thought he could lean on Arthur's competence a little. His right wrist, the worst tear from when he ripped off his bindings, is bleeding steadily through the fabric, running down to his fingers on the handlebar. Arthur stretches his arms to tie two corners so it sits more securely. It's only a few more minutes to get them back to base, where he can regather himself and sort out his injuries.

"Straight to the airport," Arthur directs when they're a few hundred metres from the ring road. "We've got a good window to slip through while they're distracted."

Eames jerks the handlebars to correct a bad leftward list, caused by the worsening state of the muscles over his lower ribs. The one supreme disaster to cap off today's bad decisions and spiteful luck would be to waste the lot of it by letting Arthur walk right back into Amundsen's clutches.

"Not fucking happening." Barely strong enough to hold them upright, there's no way he can negotiate a change in the plan and hold himself together through airport security. "A foreigner looking for the first flight out. Paying cash. Practically a confession that you've fucked someone over."

Arthur's voice tightens as the turn-off approaches: an even, disciplined contrast to the intermittent spasms and shivers his body can't hide. "There are worse men than Worner in the company, Eames, and they're in the air already. In forty minutes, they'll be on the ground. Do the smart thing – take the chance while we've got it."

Eames kicks the speed up and lets the turn-off go by, throttling the bike to an attention-grabbing pace. If he'd done the fucking smart thing, he'd have been on the road thirty seconds after the first explosion, leaving Arthur trapped in the compound to slip from one bolt-hole to another until Amundsen, ultimately, found him and turned him over to his head of security. The smart thing would never have brought him to this pass, bludgeoned into dizziness and stewing in this explosive mix of pain and humiliation and filthy self-reproach.

"Eames. Turn around."

That's his command voice, Eames registers, which usually only shows up under a shower of bullets on a dream level. So he's assuming control of the job, pulling rank and relegating Eames right back to the position of hired gun. There's something especially bitter about hearing that tone with Arthur's thighs fitted right up behind him, one hand gingerly gripped in the side of Eames's shirt, an unkind reminder that whatever new level of trust he thought they might have forged last night, Arthur is hard headed enough to be able to cast it away like dust the moment the job gets serious.

But this job is Eames's job. He planned it, he lived and breathed it, and just now he – looking back, he's startled to realise just how close he came – almost got himself killed to see it through. But if Arthur wants to play it businesslike, Eames can do that too. He slows down as they catch up to the first of the city traffic. 

"Overland back to Mombasa – you agreed to this, in case you'd forgotten." 

"You'd rather spend all night in the back of a truck, wondering when they're going to catch up with us? You can't be fucking serious." Arthur is losing his cool, shoulders and thighs tightening, voice turning ugly. 

"The airport belongs to Cobol – every last nail of it." 

"Exactly," Arthur says as if he were being dense. "They won't be looking there." 

If he's not stupid enough to count on one spectacular night being enough to turn Arthur soft, he had thought there was something there, something that deserved better than today's contempt. That was his mistake, no doubt. One of many. He slows to crawl past a delivery truck, concentrating intently to keep them balanced as they pass over the worn stretches of tarmac. The grip in his left arm is faltering and he's dreading the thought of getting them through the flow of heavy vehicles from the industrial belt in the northern suburbs. 

"This isn't up for negotiation," he says flatly. "You've been here all of four days. I know my way around. No fucking around. We stick with the plan."

"Stick with the – Eames, it's a bit goddamn late." Arthur's temper audibly snaps. His arm cinches unconsciously over Eames's injured rib, as if the right application of physical pressure could give him control of the bike's steering. "This job has gone so far off the plan it's a miracle we're still breathing. I'm making a new one – and with the amount I'm paying you'd better act like a fucking professional and follow it."

Arthur is – it takes his breath away to realise it – Arthur is dressing him down. As if today's disasters had merely confirmed Arthur's long held doubts about his ability to see a job through unsupervised – as if the improvising Eames practically killed himself with all afternoon and the sacrosanct trade rules he had broken had been nothing but incompetence. As if Eames were not just a contractor, but the sort of contractor Arthur will know better than to work with in future.

Abruptly, Eames pulls up, outside a boarded up office on the outskirts of the city proper and kicks down the stand. When he dismounts, he has to grab the handlebar for a moment to steady himself.

"You make your new plan, Arthur," he says, unclipping his satchel from the rear tray. "Indicator's on the left."

The hard lines of anger and fatigue wash off Arthur's face for a moment, giving way to blank, uncomprehending shock. "Eames," he says, hoarse and no longer in command. "Get back here."

Eames crosses the road, hands tucked under his arms to hide the spectacle of his injuries and protect the raw flesh from the dry air. When he glances back, Arthur shouts at him again, sticking close to the bike as if tethered to it. Front-on, the gape in his jacket reveals some pretty bad shrapnel wounds on his left side, the crisp blue turned dark on the shoulder and under the arm. 

"That shirt's doing you no favours," Eames calls back, and the last thing he sees before a lorry rolls between them is Arthur reaching up suspiciously to touch one of the wet patches on his chest.

He walks through Kondele to where the road from the industrial north runs through the CBD. His hands throb while he waits for the minibus, endorphins giving way like a dam before the weight of pain. He abandons the vague assumption that Arthur would have some kind of back-up plan for stitching a moderately severe de-gloving injury and binding a few cracked ribs. Yusuf will know someone, he just has to hold out through the twelve hours to Mombasa overnight.

The auto repairer is long closed by the time he gets back, but Emmanuel's mate's cousin is waiting in the shadows by the door for the money Eames goes upstairs to get for him. He rips up a couple of Arthur's shirts, which are doomed to the dustbin now in any case, and sits down on Arthur's bed to re-bind his hands. Last flight out is seven pm. Arthur will be at the airport now, either living out his last evening on earth, or pulling off the most unlikely escape of his career. He lies back on the bed and closes his eyes for a moment. He imagines it's four days ago with Arthur filling up the pot for tea, and a few more lazy, warm, barefoot mornings in front of them to fill up with idle arguments about disabling a CCTV system or erasing a CIA profile. For a few seconds, he lets himself pretend he doesn't have to get up again.


	6. Take this all in

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On the other side of that disaster of a job, Eames finds it harder than expected to leave Arthur behind him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Special extra thanks to Doro, who's been proof-reading for me. Thanks to her, I've been able to go back to past chapters and edit out some awful typos - and I'm so grateful to every reader who's charitably pretended not to see those blinders!

It's a matter of minutes to clear everything he needs into Arthur's bigger bag, along with the PASIV and Arthur's books and notes, and dump the anonymous remainder into the rubbish bin downstairs. He doesn't remember much about the trip to Mombasa, hunkered down behind a stack of broken production line parts in the back of a truck. He has a beer with Yusuf to numb the reinvigorated pain of the fresh stitches in his hand, and a second to wash down the under-the-counter antibiotics, he emails Alex from an internet cafe to let the family know he still has a heartbeat, and in another hour he's on a cargo ship heading north up the coast. 

On board there's not much to do except play cards with off-duty crew, pick at the itch under his bandages, and do sit-ups in the dead spot at the end of the walkway on the level 6 mezzanine when he needs to take his mind off things. He wins enough to buy drinks with, loses enough to stay sweet with his hosts. When he can't sleep, he sits with his back against the railings, feeling the vibrations from the ship's gargantuan engine system under and behind him, and thinks about how Arthur played him. 

On the shady side of the law, everyone bestows their trust by degrees. Eames divides his criminal colleagues into classes: competent and rock solid; competent and potentially treacherous; and people he refuses to work with at all. It takes a long time or a test of fire for anyone outside the family to get into his inner circle, but the point is that, once in, it's a select club with guaranteed lifetime admission. Eames has never turned his back on someone he called a friend.

This is why it's taken him so long to fathom the way Arthur turned on him that last day in Kisumu, with a level of sneering dismissal that left wounds because Eames, for the only time in their professional history, had let himself stop expecting it. Cobb, that trust-funded amateur, had kept his stranglehold on Arthur's loyalty in spite of his damn near fatal betrayal over the somnacin mix for Fischer. But Eames, apparently, enjoyed a grace period precisely as long as it took to wash their bodies clean of each other. He's narrowed it down to two likely reasons for that. Eames is simply not the kind of person Arthur deems suitable to have as a friend; or Arthur was never as interested as he let Eames believe.

He hangs out in the little rec room, listening to one Turkish pop song meld into another. Some days he wonders whether Arthur struck it lucky, or saw something in Eames he hadn't even known about himself, saw it clearly enough to come to Hanoi in a last, desperate roll of the dice. If Arthur had been a woman, he would have been on his guard against the way that good sex and the erotic lure of danger can short-circuit his judgment. That was among the many mistakes he made in his youth – made in utterly disastrous, life-threatening style – and learned from. If it had been anyone except logical, dispassionate Arthur, he would have seen it coming a mile off. After all, the only way to turn a paid contractor into a desperately needed ally, when you've tried his mind and his hip pocket, is to aim for a more vulnerable organ in between. 

He tries to work out exactly where it happened, but there's no one moment he can pin the con being pulled. There were insignificant, unlikely things. It's not as if Arthur went out of his way to be seductive – and that's all the more insulting, that he wasn't so smooth as to deduce Eames's fantasies and play off them, the way Eames would have done in a forgery. He pictures Arthur tying his shoelaces the last afternoon in Kisumu – two swift motions, one for the knot and one for the bow, never bothering to make it a double when a firmly pulled single in good laces will hold the whole day – and thinks what a godforsaken idiot he is to fall for such mundane, unfinessed little details as that.

When they berth at Port Saed, he finds a phone at an unattended security desk and fishes out of the depths of memory that number from that strange final morning. The woman who answers conveys, in two curt syllables, that his timing is inopportune and he had better get to the point post haste.

He doesn't bother disguising his voice. "Can I speak to Arthur, please?" 

"You have the wrong number," she tells him decisively, her attention withdrawing already. "There's never been an Arthur here."

"Wait," Eames stalls to keep her on the line. "It's a friend from Kandahar."

This time there is a cautious silence. Perhaps he guessed right, that Arthur's parents would know just enough about his dreamshare activities to recognise a location, but not enough to distinguish friends from strangers. "Who did you say you were looking for?"

Eames listens in vain for background noise, trying to fill out the picture of Arthur's home.

"I heard he was in trouble in Africa. Can you tell me if he made it home yet?"

Her voice turns professional, with a note of offence that suggests she has not often had to field this kind of call. "Who is this?"

It must be very early morning East Coast time. Arthur's mother, if that's who she is, sounds perfectly alert. He tries to imagine the sort of mother who gets up at sunrise in a state to be properly guarded with her son's ex-mercenary associates.

"Jimmy," he says. "Can you tell him Jimmy called?"

"Don't call here again, Jimmy."

She doesn't sound recently bereaved, but with a certain kind of person it's not easy to tell the difference. 

**

By the time they clear the Suez, he's so bloody tired of his cyclical train of thought that he hops off in Alexandria and checks into a suite in the most decadent hotel he can find. The balcony looks four floors down right over the Mediterranean. The chairs are clad in European linen hand-stitched with silk. He sleeps naked in pillowy sheets with the balcony door letting in cool evening sea breezes, and he still can't seem to get comfortable. 

He drinks in the first floor bar from eleven and flicks through brochures for cruise holidays whilst diligently bypassing English language newspapers. Sometime early in the second week, when a wedding party drives him away from his customary balcony table, he strolls over to the Plaza Hotel and finds out, via their business lounge, that Miriam still wants him for her job in the Hague, Frank is promising to string him up by his guts unless Tom Moorcock gets to him first, and an apparently undeceased Arthur has transferred the final tranche of his fee. 

Another night, he picks up an Irish girl in a hotel bar. She's a good storyteller and the kind of woman who seems to walk cheerfully into trouble every corner she turns. They kill most of the night drinking and talking shit. By the time she finishes telling him about the lesbian porno she made for a dare, he's more than half way interested. It's dawn by the time they get round to fucking. She's still talking while she rides him with her hasty, determined rhythm, only shuts up afterwards when he's got his mouth between her legs, and after that she pulls her t-shirt back on and holds the door open for him, saying thanks, she had fun, she needs to grab some sleep now, she's got a snorkelling course in a couple of hours and her friend will be back soon. He doesn't try to talk her round, even just for the challenge of it.

His ribcage is still mottled yellow and purple, and some days it takes a couple of hours' steady drinking to quench the pain in his swollen hand. Some days it's easiest to start the cure before the malady has a chance to set in. He tells people he punched out a window to get his neighbour's kid out of a house fire, or that he got it caught in a drift-net cable working a trawler up north, and they give every appearance of believing him. When he wants to check whether he still has the gift of selling an implausible story as gospel, he says that he got it breaking into a military-grade secure industrial facility in the most misplaced attempt at romantic heroics of his life, but he can't seem to make that one stick. 

Eventually, he goes home. 

**

The laughter coming up from the bars of Castellane sounds contrived – every note of it forced out in order to deceive, to intimidate, or to seduce. He shoves the sash down with his elbow and decides to stew in the musty indoor air instead. The empty refrigerator, newly reactivated, wheezes as if it had a point to make. He grabs pizza from the cafe downstairs because he can't face carrying around plastic shopping bags or grasping a chopping knife with his right hand still tender around the tight feeling stitches.

Coming off a job is always dicey. Africa has a special hold on him, too, that's hard to shake off. And with Frank wielding Canary Island beaches to work his way back into his wife's good graces, and Charlie and Miriam both on jobs he's turned down, there's no imminent prospect of work to take his mind off it. He spends his first two nights wandering around a few familiar haunts, but between Cobol, Fischer, Macau and Arthur he's been away for the best part of nine months, and some of the city's finest have closed, or changed hands, or been taken over by a young crowd that spends the whole night on the dance floor and doesn't want to see the same face twice. At Vince and Freddy's basement bar in Belsunce, he finds both his cousins missing in action but he doesn't let that stand in the way of a good-natured debate with a bouncer he knows about the merits of boxing versus weights. The debate turns into an invitation to a card game at a flat in le Panier, which turns into a party in Joliette, which carries on to a game of football played under headlights on a gloomy, unfenced pitch nearby, and eventually turns into the sort of hazy, never-ending night he needed.

He's still on the way home, sharing a cab with a severely elegant young lady who imports knock-off designer shoes concealed in tyre shipments and appears to have become, while he was away, the closest thing Freddy has ever had to a girlfriend, when Miriam calls. He sidesteps her enquiries about the Kisumu job and tells her to get to the point, which it turns out is that she wants his opinion on whether it would take more than a minute to drill out the primary lock on a Chubb Profile series secure filing cabinet.

"Hang on," he sits up straight, breaking off part way through the answer. "Are you telling me you don't know this?"

There's a pause. "Of course I know. Arthur wants a second opinion."

"Arthur."

"Don't start. You weren't interested and the job needs someone solid."

He puts the sunshade down to get the ache of early morning light out of his eyes and buzzes the window down. He'd expected a good long period of letting bygones cool into bygones before having to hear that name again. The air in his face cuts through the fog between his ears; he notices how his hand is throbbing where he overdid it last night. 

"Yeah well." Under the simmering layers of impulse, some detached, cautious part of him recognises that this is dangerous territory in the state he's in. "Here's my advice. If he's working your job, he doesn't ask for second opinions. End of story."

He hears her faint sigh, then her voice switches in a way he doesn't like. "Jim, how are you?'

He pretends not to hear. "Tell him to pull his over-educated head in and learn to do what he's bloody well told."

And from then on he lets her calls go through to voicemail, because it's not as if she can tell him anything about working a job with Arthur that he hasn't already learned.

In the afternoon, he hits up contacts in the auction trade until he finds a pair of Sèvres jugs that seem right for Moorcock's ostentatious tastes, and gets them shipped his way with a card that reads 'Sorry for the inconvenience'. The morning after that, less than half sober, he chucks away a good bit of Arthur's fee on a second-hand boat with white leather internal fittings and state of the art navigation, because the difference between _money_ and _wealth_ is that wealth is for spending on things you've got absolutely no use for, and he's fucking well earned himself a bit of that. 

Leaning on a dockside bollard after his first trip, a bit dazzled by the reflections off the choppy water and the lingering sense of rocking, he succumbs to an unexpectedly charitable moment and thinks about how to set things right with Arthur. One way of looking at it, if Arthur played him, it was only because Eames gave him both the motive and the method by muddying their professional relationship with those stupid, arrogant terms he set. He'd feel a lot more comfortable about Arthur running point for Miriam and Reggie if he could dispel the suspicion that he's got every right to bear a grudge about the mess the Kisumu job turned into after the undignified price he had paid, and the certainty that Arthur's grudges are bound to be the patiently nursed, lethally devastating kind. It won't be as easy as flashy antiques. Arthur's susceptibilities are a lot harder to pin down. He thinks that kicking some good opportunities his way might do the trick, so long as it doesn't come to the two of them working together. Time will fix the bitterness, and a few distractions will stop him wanting what he can't have. Until then, he'd just as soon skip the hard work it would take to keep their professional locking of horns from blowing up into something dangerously personal.

That evening, a wine glass slips out of his bandaged right hand and, while digging out the vacuum cleaner to suck up the smashed pieces, he rips some of the rope burn scabs off his left wrist and finds himself sick to the bones of trying to tough it out by himself. He shoves his few remaining clean clothes in the bag from Kisumu with the unwashed gear still in it, and drives around to the family home in the eighth arrondissement, a little way back from the water at Pointe-Rouge. Faiza, the shoe merchant, gives him a dubious look as she passes on her way out the door, leaving him the empty house. Drinking most of a bottle of red out of Frank's cellar, he puts in a long overdue call to his mother, makes some half-genuine promises to find a reason to visit her in Italy, checks in with Grandmother Margot who's with Julie's family in Lyon for the birth of her first great-grandchild, and stretches out on the thin bed in the sunroom where he used to sleep on school holidays back from London, when he was hungry for the glamour of the trade and completely ignorant about its scars.

**

"I thought you weren't slumming it with them anymore," Celine observes without a break in stacking jars of multivitamins amongst the diet pills and pharmaceuticals of dubious legitimacy in her little pharmacy, an arm-span from wall to wall. 

True enough, he's got nothing good to say about the Tierney brothers' methods, but their reputation for getting jobs done at any cost means the most interesting commissions come their way. "I always keep the door open, you know that."

She does know, having set him up with a couple of different teams when he was making his name as a forger, through her contacts in the somnacin chemistry she mixes with her legal and quasi-legal business. 

"Bit sore at home, is it? After that shit you pulled down south."

Some members of his family have got bloody big mouths, for thieves. 

"It's for a friend."

She glances at him over her shoulder. "The one with the price on his head?"

"It's blown over," he tells her with a wry smile. "All a big misunderstanding." 

She leaves off the merchandise when her little boy comes in to wheedle the price of a can of drink out of her, and she lays down the list of what he can and can't buy with it. 

"He's smart," Eames prompts her. "Steady. Too good for the Tierneys, unless they've got the mother of all extractions."

She taps a plastic pill bottle against the counter, thinking.

"Will he do R&D? There's a team at Kyoto working on vaporised compounds, off the record. You might call that a good advantage to have. I can put him in touch with the guy in charge."

He kisses her, keeping it chastely to her cheek.

Heading down towards the port, he leaves a message for Freddy to come take a spin in the new boat, but he doesn't get a call back, and by the time he gets there it's raining, so he sits in the front window of a bar overlooking the water and watches the weather come in off the sea. In a brighter frame of mind than he's felt in weeks, he turns his focus wholly to the future, starts to run over the kind of job he'd like to put together next, and who he'll bring on board to work on it.

**

The house he left empty is full of noise and dust by the time he gets back.

"What about your job?" he asks, openly puzzled, when he runs into Miriam, hair tied back and power drill in hand, half way down the hallway.

"We wrapped it up last night," she says briskly, stepping past him. "It went like a dream. Lucky for you."

In the kitchen, Vince is filling up the room with the amped-up swagger he usually leaves to his older brother, mixing in the East End big talk he inherited from Frank along with the French. It's probably a family member he's trying rather pointlessly to shout down over the phone. Sounds like something gone wrong at the bar. Window damage. Equipment needs replacing. Of course he hasn't got a police report for the insurance policy – does he look like the kind of shit-for-brains who'd get the police involved in something like this?

Eames is starting to get the awful feeling that either the Sèvres ware hasn't got to its recipient, or there's someone he forgot to pay off. 

"You got front, man," Freddy says, coming up behind him. "Twatting about on your boat all day while we're keeping the business running."

The damage at the bar can't be too bad if he's still strutting about the house, relishing both the drama and the chance to upset the generational order and put Eames in his place. Whatever happened was probably only a warning. 

"Good to see you, kid. Return a call once in a while, won't you. Not too busy to stop for a burger, I see – you've got mayo just-"

"Will you listen to the man?" Freddy says in his father's world-weary, scoffing turn of phrase, jerking away from Eames's hand. "Hey - where d'you want it?"

An instantly familiar voice comes from the access panel in the ceiling above them. 

"Here." 

And down reaches Arthur's left hand, as broad palmed and clean and capable as Eames remembers, to accept the motion detector unit passed up to him. They both listen to the shuffling of knees and click of the torch above, then the nozzle of it slots down through a newly bored hole in the ceiling. 

Not long after that, Arthur's legs and hips swivel through the square hatch. He lowers himself on his elbows, then with a firm grip on the edge of the hole lets himself down close enough to drop the last stretch onto the carpet. 

"Eames," he says, perfectly neutral. 

With the dust on the sleeves of his navy blue t-shirt and ground into the knees of his jeans, and the strand of cobweb snagged on the loose curls on top of his head, he makes a disarming picture of straight-up simplicity. He could be on college holidays, tinkering improvised upgrades onto the stereo system. It defies belief that he might recently have walked out of the snake-pit of Cobol's operational front with barely a scratch; it's even more fanciful to imagine him pulling a subtle, methodical and devastatingly successful emotional con on a thoroughbred criminal like Eames with artisanal thievery on both sides of his family. 

Eames is angry to find this moment, which he'd expected to confront on a stage of his own choosing and with all the distractions of a job for the backdrop, thrust upon him unprepared.

"Bit of help down here please," Miriam's voice carries from the front door.

Arthur just brushes at the dust on his clothes, waiting. 

"Go on," Eames tells him dismissively. "Do as you're bid."

He gives a glance down at Eames's hand, like he's not going to let the conversation be so easily derailed.

"Your tremendous concern is noted, Arthur. Now let's not make a song and dance of it."

Phone drawn out like a 21st century shield before he's even finished speaking, he returns to the sleeping space he's staked out in the sunroom, to make sure there are no additions there that would trespass upon his privacy. There are, of course – ominous drill holes in the ceiling, and a fine wire sticky-taped temporarily to the top of the window sash.

Arthur's bag is in the library, which is their lofty name for the windowless nook behind the laundry that contains an old chaise longue with the stuffing half out, a single bookshelf stashed full of research for one con or another, and his mother's abandoned collection of art books. The chaise is about a foot too short for a man of Arthur's height to get properly horizontal, and yet someone's thrown a pillow at one end and a folded blanket over the other. It looks like he's here for a bit.

**

He integrates himself into Eames's family as if working with a new extraction team in which each and every member required his individual attention, just the right amount to gauge their strengths and weaknesses and optimise the role he might allocate them. Foreboding tickles Eames's senses every time he passes Arthur chopping carrots for Faiza's cassoulet, or sitting at the garden table with a few of his dad's old Sotheby's catalogues, but when he looks for signs of ill intent, all he gets from Arthur is a careful sense of distance. 

At breakfast, he finds Arthur in the kitchen, talking about hand guns with a trio of Algerians who Vinnie has brought back from the club, unslept and still jittery as they come down from whatever lit up their night. They are all the young side of 21, full of bluster with their bare arm muscles permanently flexed. Rather than being taken for a threat, however, they seem to be drawing out Arthur's reclusive sense of humour. Eames picks up the quiet amusement in the way he keeps his eyes on the surface of his coffee and gently corrects only the most egregious of their exaggerations. 

"- on the counter- " Arthur breaks off part-way through an overview of the technical specification of the SIG 550 series. "And that was a twenty percent improvement on the classic model, talking range and precision-"

On the counter is a cup of coffee, black and still faintly steaming, a very attractive alternative to battling the narrow handle of the cafetière he'd just taken up. 

It's pretty easy to stay out of each other's way, because Eames is putting a job together and Arthur seems to have decided that Eames is the least interesting person in the house. When he isn't at the kitchen table flipping through his new security feeds, he's rarely out of the company of one of Eames's relatives, lapping up endless shop talk and heist anecdotes that are already pretty threadbare with constant retelling. 

It's only when Mario and his boys drop in looking for a hand with some creative bookkeeping for the wrecking yard that he sees the return of the businesslike, quietly superior persona through which Arthur usually relates to professional peers. The sense of destructive potential that comes with his cousins' trade is heightened just now with the volatile tension of the nasty turf war that's escalated in the last couple of months: they have menace turned up to maximum. Arthur's business face goes up like shutters the moment they come in the door, and he turns quiet, watchful, answering their questions with coolly delivered lies in his grammar text French. Eames was right to think of him like a bank. The way he stiffens up, scowl slipping into place, leather jacket zipped and his smile put away in a well fortified safe, he looks like he doesn't have a warm drop of blood in his body. Looking back, Eames doesn't blame himself for being fooled.

The night they get the news that his dad's repatriation has finally come through, he hears Arthur at 2am on the roof, after hours of back-to-back champagne, sharing the last of a bottle with Faiza. She is wearing one of her own imports, Jimmy Choo knock-offs with heels that could go right through a man's eye socket and almost out the other side of his skull. From the ground, Arthur raises his hand to where she can reach if she wobbles as she climbs down the ladder. He steadies her with a hand on her spine, laughing, as she manages the drop where the last rung is broken, and walks her out to the street to where a taxi is waiting to take her to the club.

For four weeks, his memory of Arthur had been frozen in the place their relationship had been severed at, on the road outside Kisumu: steely determination, unquestioning intellectual superiority, and blazing frustration at things he can't control. It's unsettling to be reminded of the other side of Arthur that's off limits to him now. 

**

The Sèvres ware seems to find its way to Tom Moorcock eventually, because since the vicious break-in that lined the floor with broken glass and pieces of shattered mixing deck, no-one uninvited has disturbed the peace at Freddy and Vince's club. At home, Arthur's security web has lapsed into state-of-the-art obsolescence. But Eames is still working on a make-up gift for Opperman. The art of survival on the shadowy side of the law is always being able to produce a sacrificial lamb, someone to offer up to rivals or investigators if it's the only way to avert disaster; someone to take that essential job that'll like as not turn into a suicide mission. Absent specific scores to settle, you throw out the man lowest on the list of contractors you've worked with. Opperman's list being in regular and merciless use, Eames is making damn sure to stay a few rungs off the bottom.

He's reading up on the other party to a failed joint venture that cost Cobol big in Nigeria, trying to navigate the maze of front companies and minority shareholdings to find the controlling mind he can present to Opperman on a metaphorical platter, when he becomes aware of a presence lurking in the doorway.

"Anything I can help with?" Arthur says over the mouth of a beer bottle, looking so solicitous and incongruously unbuttoned that Eames's hackles go right up, accustomed as he's become to banishment from Arthur's field of interest.

He frowns studiously at the laptop on his knees as if he'd just found something juicier than the FSA home page, replying absent-mindedly, "You two were having such a lovely chat about the Anti-Counterfeiting Treaty out there. Don't let me interrupt. I was sure you were just about to get to the bottom of it."

He swears half-aloud as, for the thousandth time, his bandage-hobbled fingers on the sensitive track pad take him somewhere he never intended. 

"Show me," Arthur insists. Eames has to shift to make room on the sofa beside him. "So long as it's not a plan to take me out. And even if it is, I've got inside information that would make your toes curl."

Arthur's more than a little drunk, Eames realises, and when he looks at the clock in the corner of the screen to find the afternoon that started with lunch in the garden has somehow turned into the brink of evening, he's not surprised. 

"Jesus, Eames, aren't you fucking done with Africa?" He steadies his beer bottle on the coffee table and leans heavily into Eames's shoulder to switch browser tabs. "Uranium? Don't do it. The end customer is always government and those thieving fuckers will have your balls off and call it lawful expropriation."

There's a bitter undertone there that speaks of personal experience, and that's the sort of history he wants to know.

"Only if you go in blind," Eames needles.

But by then Arthur has shifted the computer onto his own lap with the determined focus of a four year old emptying out a new jigsaw. "So what are we digging up here?"

He works as if oblivious to Eames's presence, but Eames finds it hard to reciprocate his indifference just now. The light in the back windows is taking on a bronze tint. The bones in Arthur's hand are rising and falling with a musician's elegance as he types. If he were a pretty party guest, a mate of Miriam's, if they didn't have history, Eames would reach up to straighten his dress strap or the clasp on his necklace, any thinly masked excuse to touch. 

"Mind if I install a little software?" Arthur asks, squirming pleasantly against Eames's hip to get a set of keys out of his back pocket, flipping open the innocuous logo piece to produce a USB connection that goes straight into the waiting port. 

"Be my guest," Eames murmurs belatedly.

There's a lingering dimple on Arthur's cheek. Eames doesn't know whether it's for him, or just the thrill of the job.

"How much," he ponders as a military search engine he recognises from Hanoi comes up, "would Arthur's stick of power fetch me on the black market, do you suppose?"

Definitely not just the job. "Your innuendo, Mr Eames, is duly noted."

By the time the windows have faded to grey, Arthur's got him the name that he needs, and a home address to boot. From the kitchen comes the sound of fresh glasses coming out of the cupboard. Music goes on – the sort of hip hop/RNB compromise that happens when Freddy and Miriam are both in the house. Arthur folds down the laptop screen and detaches his memory stick. 

"That," he tells Eames emphatically, "is the single worst attempt at first aid I've ever seen. Do you have enemies in the medical profession, or here in your family?"

He upturns his bandaged hand on Arthur's thigh. "Falls short of the ISO standard, does it?"

"Falls short of a dog's breakfast. Who the hell did this?"

In different company, on another day, he might admit that once he'd exhausted the patience of his doctor, he'd twice driven across the city to prevail on an ex girlfriend, got short shrift from Faiza the one time he asked, paid a rent boy an extra fifty to scrub, disinfect and bind it, and then fallen back on his own hampered efforts. 

"If you think you can do better--"

Arthur goes gently on the fastening, placing it with care on the coffee table before beginning the slow unwinding. Eames likes the stray brushes of skin on skin at the periphery of the fabric. He watches the feminine curl of Arthur's eyelashes as he focuses, the flat profile of his face. His strong, straight mouth. Sometime tonight he's going to kiss Arthur, a bit later when there's more chance of it leading them into bed, but he's going to give them both a couple of hours to anticipate it first. Maybe afterwards he'll mention the R&D job in Kyoto.

Gingerly as he works, Arthur's a bit clumsy at this after all, though it's been half an hour since he drank from his bottle. He's banging on about uranium as he unravels Eames's botch-up of bandages, and gold futures, and a World Bank funded venture in Tanzania that went off the rails. The flesh underneath is pallid and unpleasant, still swollen where it pulls against the -

"Where did that come from?"

Arthur pauses with the crumpled gauze pad between his fingers. What he just described was one of the dearly bought secrets Eames had prised out of Yusuf, but not found a way to use. "It's hardly common knowledge, Arthur. Where did you pick it up?"

He shrugs. "I was plugged into the Cobol system anyway, to drop that information on Amundsen. Some of his files were practically begging to be copied."

He darts Eames a tentative smile that looks like quiet pride. And just like that, Eames finds himself wanting to smash it right off his face, because the stolen files he's being so cavalier about are probably enough to throw Eames and his family right back onto Opperman's to-do list.

"That wasn't the deal." His tone makes Arthur tense up like a knife coming out – the lingering influence of the day's drinking reveals the change as clear as day. "We never discussed a data theft job. What else are you keeping me in the dark about?"

"You know that's not how I work."

"Do I?"

Arthur drops the discarded bandage, the insistent nursing vanishing along with the last of his beery camaraderie. "Have you forgotten, Eames? You set all the terms – every last one. And if you forgot to mention you were precious about data extraction, well that's another one of your fuck-ups."

A compulsive lifelong shit-stirrer with a hide of pure industrial grade steel, Eames has no explanation for the defensive, haughty sarcasm that comes out of his mouth all of a sudden.

"Thank you, Arthur, for your forthright opinion of my-"

"Jesus Christ," Arthur says wearily over the top of him, standing up. "I paid your fee, Eames – all of it – and that makes me the one in charge. I made one fucking decision without running it past you. Big deal."

When he's gone, Eames pages unseeingly through the annual report sitting open on his screen and dwells on all the ways he could have played that smarter. There was a time he was the one pushing Arthur's buttons, goading Arthur into losing his temper, never the other way round. 

He can admit to himself that he's far from his intuitive best right now, when it comes to the two of them. Every time his thoughts return to those days above the auto repair shop, working one-on-one and battling the clock to produce minor miracles with no resources apart from elegant teamwork and sheer inspiration, working in sync for once with all the barriers of team politics and personal competition forgotten, he's embarrassed at how much it meant to him, and how completely unremarkable Arthur seems to have found it all. The vulnerability in him seems obvious, in retrospect. The professional template Eames grew up with was Frank and his dad, who agreed on crisis decisions with a split-second glance when a job turned bad, as if they could read each other's minds. It's hard to find that kind of trust outside the family. In extraction, Eames had kept his distance, and never even thought to look for it until now.

Whatever Arthur was ready to offer tonight, it was something temporary, well short of the unexpectedly fine professional partnership he can't talk himself out of missing. Client and contractor is how Arthur insistently cast them once again. As the battery runs down to nothing, he thinks perhaps he should grab what's on offer and stop begrudging Arthur's abandonment of the rest.

The data theft problem is fixable if he keeps it plain, businesslike and separate. He takes the glass of red Vince brings him and tells himself that, if he finds himself struggling to hit his old note of untouchable nonchalance, he ought to be capable of a much better job of faking it.

Being the younger brother doesn't make Vince a pushover. It makes him cheerfully, ruthlessly strategic. It costs Eames a day's loan of his new boat to get the bandage put back on, and, because he's too distracted to do a watertight deal, a case of beer to get it properly fastened. 

**

Not that any other time of day catches him slumming, but Arthur is at his best in the morning. After a run and a shower, he sits at the garden table just as the first direct sun is clearing the treetops, with a paper, his laptop, and his phone in front of him, as if his toast and quartered apple are not the only sustenance he needs. 

Eames picks his moment fifteen minutes later, emerging with two black coffees and a car magazine he has no intention of reading. When he mentions Celine's research job in Kyoto, he gets guarded interest. 

"Put me in touch with your contact. I've got questions." 

Then Arthur sweeps toast crumbs off the tabletop, looking for all the world like he's forgotten the offer already. His interest wanes even lower when Eames mentions the copied Cobol files. 

"And there you were saying you weren't in their pocket. Sounds like you're not so much of a free agent as you think, Eames."

In a dream, in someone else's skin, he could say to Arthur that he'd played a few cards wrong, under pressure, and got himself in trouble with Opperman. He could ask for help with a stubborn, humiliated incline of his head that would play on Arthur's sympathies and make him want to give it. But he's got his pride, and he knows when he's in a corner. Remembering the terms he set in Hanoi when the boot was on the other foot and Arthur came to him for help, all he can say is, "Look, let's keep it commercial. Eighty thousand for the lot."

Arthur laughs, not unkindly. 

"Come on, you could use the money." 

"Eighty won't cut it."

"Eighty-five. Best and final offer."

According to Arthur, Saito will put several times that on the table, even without knowing that a few highly specific files mention Proclus by name. 

"Not him, for god's sake don't sell to Saito. Not him of all people." 

With confidential files in the hands of their biggest and most ruthless customer, he thinks of the wave of unmitigated violence Cobol will send through their staff and contractors until the source of the leak is ground out of existence and the earth scorched for miles around.

Arthur just tells him mildly, "Then make me a better offer."

The Macau money is in the long process of being laundered through two or three offshore filters. Most of the first tranche of Arthur's fee went to Julie for family investments and won't be quick or easy to get back. As for the rest, with the cost of the boat, the desperation price he let Yusuf extort from him, and what he pissed away in those two weeks in a beachside penthouse ... the few extra thousand he could scrape together wouldn't raise the figure into Saito's league. 

In a tight voice he barely recognises, Eames says, "I'm afraid that's the best I've got."

Arthur leans over the table to tear out the article about voice control technology that Eames had been pretending to read. The page comes away neatly.

"I'm not in a hurry. See if you can do better."

**

In the dark recesses of the garden, smoking one of Faiza's cigarettes, Eames fuels his creativity from a bottle of single malt as he runs through hypothetical schemes to steal the information from Arthur. Getting the keyring with the flash drive would be a matter of light-fingered finesse; the hard part is eliminating the failsafes and backup copies its owner is bound to have secreted in unguessable places. Extracting from Arthur, even in the hypothetical, seems too much like placing his head in a lion's mouth. 

Through the back window, he can see where Miram, Celine and Arthur are bent over the kitchen table as Celine sketches out something that could be a chemical compound, or a team structure, or a ground plan of the Hermitage. Arthur gently shifts her dangling string of orange beads off the paper. It's obvious from the way it played out with Cobb that trust is Arthur's big blind spot – trust bestowed on few inside the industry, but once given, given too freely. What Eames doesn't know is how far away he is from being inside that circle, and what kind of ground work it would take to get there.

"He's very candid, your friend," says Faiza from her seat under the pine tree. "Not like you at all."

"I talk like a drunk politician. Your words, that night in Joliette."

She laughs and pulls her legs up on the seat as if to guard against the chill. He likes her; what he doesn't like is what Freddy's stunned and wounded heart is going to do to the business, one day, when she moves on from him. 

"All the words in the world," she says with a contemplative flick of ash, "don't make a gram of truth."

He tops up her empty glass from his bottle and sits opposite her, thinking it's doubtful that Arthur would break his strict policy of never discussing the merest existence of extraction with anyone not already up to their neck in the industry. "What's he shared with you then? Bet you don't even know where he lives."

She can't remember that, although it's not New York or San Francisco, but she does remember that it's a two hour flight from his parents. She remembers that his childhood garden had a grove of apple trees. She remembers that things with his father have never quite healed from the disappointment when he threw away the family trade of engineering without finishing his degree. Eames glances inside, where Celine is describing something to Arthur that brings his incisive, analytical face on, and allows himself a moment of smugness for having picked half of that.

He knocks back the rest of his glass and refills it. "Lured away into a life of danger as a gun for hire, I know."

"What?"

Turns out his mercenary days in Afghanistan are something Arthur hasn't been quite so candid about, and it's a hard job to deflect her curiosity and divert them onto a safer topic. By the time he's worked his way back to where they left off, the whiskey is starting to blunt his persuasive skills, and she's lost her enthusiasm for teasing him with withheld knowledge.

"Oh, some kind of machine," she waves a dismissive hand, as if true advances in technology ought to come with diamante ankle straps and spike heels. "A sleeping machine. He was on a research team in college. Pursued it like a ... like a lover."

The inside of Eames's mouth is tingling with the taste of pieces coming together. His drink-numbed brain can't get a solid enough grip on his thoughts to be sure. 

"The government-"

"They shut it down. Took away the sleeping machine. Is he an angry man, Arthur? I think he could be, under it all."

In the kitchen, the object of her speculation is stirring something with his fingers in a bowl, tilting it towards Celine for observation, a smile on his face. It's impossible to tell whether the intention is cooking or demonstrating a chemical reaction. Eames could have walked through the room with his shirt on fire any time tonight without Arthur giving him a second glance. 

"Back then, perhaps," he replies. "These days, business is business. He couldn't care enough to get angry."

Faiza pauses, cigarette to her lips, observing him. "You think so?"

The back door thumps closed. "Get off my lady, old man."

Freddy is mostly joking. But there's a challenge there that didn't used to be, as if Eames's fuck-up in Kenya has permanently crippled his authority and provided an invitation to leapfrog him in the family trade. Normally Eames knows better than to rise to it, but he was born with a deep-down urge to make trouble for sheer entertainment, and under sufficient quantities of alcohol and frustration he clean forgets how to keep it under control.

"No harm in a little competition," he grins. "A pearl like this deserves the best."

One day Freddy is going to learn that his father's unflappable good humour is not a form of submission but a highly effective weapon, one he too can learn to wield. Until then, he's going to keep on being volatile, easy to provoke, and completely unsuited to high-stakes cons. 

Eames considers it his cousinly duty to assist in his education. "No need to get upset, kid," he tells him, so of course the kid rolls his shoulders in a signal that he's ready to throw a punch if pushed. "Really?"

Freddy glances down at his injured hand, as if the bandages alone were an admission of defeat. 

"Won't stop me," Eames tells him darkly, and god bless the predictability of testosterone and youth, Freddy shrugs off his jacket. 

It's only drunken bareknuckle sparring, under house rules they've both followed since they could first stand up and swing. Eames takes a hit to the jaw and another to the very edge of his concealed rib injury that hurts like a bastard and makes him regret the last few glasses. He gives better than he gets, though. They go one round before Freddy remembers that Eames has got a decade more experience in spotting defensive weaknesses and ramming his fist into them, and lets Vince drag him laughingly away. It's long enough to smash up one of Grandmother Margot's mottled pink roses and bring Arthur out of the house. In the crook of his elbow is a yellow bowl full of roasted nuts that smell caramelly and warm. For the first time all night, he looks Eames in the eye, and Eames's can't see anything there but disappointment.

He gives Faiza a kiss on the corner of the mouth, endures her good-humoured shove, and goes inside for a new bottle and a private corner to nurse his wounds. 

**

He wakes up long before dawn with his hand aching right up to the elbow, like a hammer hitting the flesh with each heartbeat, worse than when the skin was first ripped. After a couple of hours of trying to settle it so the pain is bearable, he digs through Frank and Lydia's bathroom cabinet until he finds some diazepam and crawls back into bed.

It's evening when he comes around again. There's a glass of water on the table that wasn't there before. Something wrong-feeling in his head makes him fish his trousers off the floor and check his totem, though he's pretty sure it's beyond Arthur and Celine's combined abilities to replicate this particular feeling of all-round malaise in a dream – hung over, over-slept, still exhausted, muddle-headed like a stranger imprisoned in someone else's sluggish body. 

His bandage is half off from the fist fight, so he knots it as best he can, takes a pair of sweat pants from the few options in his bag that aren't twice worn already, and stumbles downstairs looking for distraction. There's a coffee on the counter gone cold. Against all sensible instincts, he chucks it down the sink and plumps for hair of the dog instead. 

He's on his second whiskey and soda, in front of the football with one of Faiza's rai mixes playing over the top of the commentary, still waiting for the concrete in his head to break up a bit, when the front door announces Arthur's return. It must be the maternal pose, arm full of grocery bags, that makes the expression he turns on Eames feel like a criticism. 

"Oh, keep your posh fucking standards to yourself," he growls before Arthur has a chance to start. "I'm not on your payroll anymore – and it's not likely to happen again, so don't expect me to give a shit what you think of how I live."

Arthur glances down at his bare feet, meets his gaze evenly, says nothing. He continues on into the kitchen, then goes to his own guest bed in the library, leaving Eames to turn up the volume obnoxiously as if the noise vibrations could shake his head back into shape. He leans back in his chair and closes his eyes, thinking he's in no condition to leave the house if he can't even distinguish whether the commentary is Italian or Spanish, thinking it has to get better soon.

The next thing he knows, Arthur is stripping the bandage off his hand with the swift actions of a busy casualty nurse, none of the flirtatious leisure of the first time. He grabs Eames's forearm firmly, fingers digging in to stop him pulling away. "You did this on my job, and you are damn well going to take care of it properly. The rest is your business."

Since Eames hasn't got the energy to fight against his own self-interest right now, Arthur gets his way. As he scrubs with antiseptic solution, he frowns over Eames's hand a little sulkily, as if the puffy belt of swollen flesh crowned with a jagged red line around the stitches were a personal affront. It's a less worn-out version of the scrutiny he trained on the third floor corridor of his mock-up in their little room in Kisumu, applying every ounce of his intellect to outsmarting a difficult problem. Eames's thoughts get blurry. He remembers kissing Arthur's neck once, there, just under the severe line of his jaw: lean muscle and lightly abrasive skin. He could do it again right now, without caring that Arthur might have been only half interested then and completely indifferent today.

"I'll check into a hotel tomorrow." Arthur doesn't look up from where he's wrapping a new gauze pad around the wound, taping it across the palm. "Get out of your face."

Eames swigs from his glass, grateful that the alcohol is finally kicking in to mellow out the targetless irritation that was driving him mad, even if his head is still something worse than drunk. Arthur winds a clean bandage on, tight, just the right side of uncomfortable. Watching him work is a reminder of all the tiny little displays of dexterity – IV lines and shoelaces and pistol cartridges and a diesel engine in South Sudan – that he fell for so stupidly in the first place. That's a point man's life, isn't it? At least the way Arthur does it. Minuscule exercises in perfection that, for the most part, nobody appreciates or sees. He wonders if Arthur even notices it himself anymore.

He feels the moment of surprise as Arthur's fingers freeze in their task. Distantly, he tries to recall which bit of idle speculation just escaped from his drug-addled mouth and prompted that reaction. Arthur's face has turned down a little more than it needs to be, as if he didn't know how to accept a professional compliment, as if his conceited, patrician self-image didn't know every word of it already.

"Are you done yet?" Eames says gruffly. "My glass is empty."

When he comes back with a fresh drink, Arthur is sitting on the sofa opposite the armchair, watching the game with the volume turned back to an undertone and the music switched to something brassy and smooth from the forties. As he sits down, the whistle blows for half-time. 

"What happened?" Arthur asks out of nowhere, part way through the muted ad break. "At the Cobol plant – what went wrong?"

Eames puts the glass to his mouth to shut himself up. He's way below his best, vulnerable like a secure facility with all the perimeter sensors taken out. Even at his sharpest, he couldn't give voice to what had panicked him into action that day, the unwanted emotion that had skewed his professional judgment long enough to push him in through the side gate. It all seems so stupid and out of proportion, in retrospect. He's got enough self-censorship left to know it will sound like romantic babble, even to his own ears, if he lets it out now. 

"Eames? You should never have been inside the compound. That wasn't in the plan."

What does Arthur want him to say that isn't abundantly obvious already? He's had time to revisit every wrong step, tease out the lessons, and learn them well: there's no better teacher than a slow-healing flesh wound. It bruises, though. Arthur's assumption that without this little talk, Eames might have blundered blithely on, blind to his own mistakes.

"I fucked up," he says. "It must be the highlight of your year to hear that, Arthur. I fucked up. Not just one thing but quite a few things on that job, as it happens. All my own fault, one hundred percent, two hundred percent and, look, I got what I deserved." He waves his bandaged hand. 

For a moment, it feels good, it feels wonderful to have said it, like the removal of a long-aching splinter. Then he sees from Arthur's face that it wasn't what he wanted. 

"If you're waiting for some sort of detailed post project review, you're not getting one. That's not in my standard services." 

"Sure," Arthur says, coldly, as if he'd suddenly lost interest.

His unspoken disappointment brings them right back to where they started. But Eames is angry now, and couldn't give a fuck. He flicks off the soft jazz and replaces it with one of Vince's gangsta rap playlists, full of big lyrical bragging, gang posturing, strung together with bland obscenities.

He takes a glass of water out into the back garden to get his head clear, but it still hasn't done the trick by the time Vince comes out to remind him the re-opening of the club is in an hour and if he ever wants to be back in Freddy's good books, he'd better be there.

**

One of the smashed windows is still boarded up, but that adds to the kind of industrial chic the place has got going on. The ruined sound system has been upgraded to something with more juice that transmits a fine bass buzz right through the very mortar of the building. 

Although on the French side of the family his grandfather could switch from waltz to foxtrot to tango in the blink of an eye, Eames takes after the English side. He wouldn't be caught dead on the dance floor, and isn't built for it anyway. He leans on the bar and nurses a soda water. Miriam keeps him company for the duration of her first martini. 

Arthur dances beautifully. It's nothing especially lithe or erotic or showy. He's just effortlessly easy to dance with, like he knows where Faiza's hand is going to be a second before she spins and flings it out. He moves with his partners and doesn't try to upstage them. He never loses the rhythm. The vibe of the club is pretty hetero, but dance music throws down all the boundaries of sexual orientation. He watches Arthur make sparking eye contact with a dark-haired gym type, with muscles on display in the deep neck of his shirt, sculpted and glossy and waxed. He orders his next soda water with a bit more kick in it. 

A couple of drinks on, he takes a tablet one of Vince's mates offers him, and a bloke who might have blown him once shows up at the other end of the bar. They've got as far as the bathrooms – the bloke is rubbing him through his jeans against the sink – when he realises he's got no interest after all. Pushing his way down the crowded stairs, his sense of proportion is just starting to get unreliable when he throws himself into the first taxi he finds and gives out the family address. God only knows what he pays with because he won't find change in his pockets afterwards. 

His memory of Arthur's fingers on the new key pad is vivid enough to get him through the front door security, and then, overwhelmed by the certainty that now is the time to set things right, he ends up in the library, ready to fix everything at once. He starts with the con books, which are shoved in piles in the bookshelf, according to most recent use, with two cardboard boxes housing spillover on the top. That won't do, not when Arthur's blanket and sheets are folded in perfect rectangles on the chest at the end of the chaise. He takes them down, shelf by shelf, blows the dust off, and starts putting them into piles. 

Although he goes about his work meticulously – shifting the spines beside one another to maximise consistency between height and width and colour, trying different combinations until they look like they came as a set – it's a long task full of errors of judgment that require copious re-packing, and only three of the four shelves are full when he's interrupted by footsteps in the hall behind him. 

"Hi," Eames says in an unexpectedly hoarse voice, delighted by his audience. "Back already. Hang on a moment. I left the black till last."

Arthur watches him hold a card trick manual against a history of the Spanish royal family and find the match unsatisfying. 

"It isn't all the same colour," Eames explains. "That's lazy thinking. Not good enough."

"Eames," Arthur says, and pushes on his shoulders until he sits down on the chaise. He takes the books away and puts them back in the pile. "It's seven in the morning."

When he opens his mouth to reply that it's barely past midnight, he feels tired, very tired. His muscles, now that they've stopped, harden like clay into exhaustion. 

"See," Arthur says, low and fond. He looks tired himself, loose limbed, contented. His hair is smoothed back off his face, but ragged and curling with the rigours of the dance floor, none of the synthetic gloss of his professional uniform. 

Eames leans forward, forehead against the warm cotton of Arthur's shirt. His ribs are steady, breathing shallow, and Eames thinks just here, just here is good enough. Just here is the best place in the world, right now. He misses Arthur – though they've been sleeping a floor away, he misses him fiercely. When he presses a kiss through that thin layer, the muscle tenses under his mouth. 

There's a faint heartbeat under his forehead. It draws up the most vivid memory of Kisumu: Arthur leaning back into the angle of his arm and his torso, their bare skin meeting warm and familiar, his hair brushing Eames's neck as he tilted his head back to take a long, thirsty drink. He lurches to his feet and manages to kiss Arthur's mouth once. The murmur he gets is a lot more complex than rejection, then Arthur's mouth parts for him, hesitant. 

The next thing he knows, he's collapsing onto the chaise. 

"You missed a good night," Arthur says as he shakes out the blanket and drapes it over him. Though his chest is full of wanting, his mind is shutting down, casting the words he needs into darkness. There'd been no taste of lipstick, or worse – he'd been paying attention. He watches Arthur's hands move, straightening the blanket firmly. The light goes off. From far away he can hear Miriam's voice, a laugh.

"Arthur," he says.

Kneeling on the floor by the last two piles of books, Arthur slides his hand over Eames's eyes. The weight of his touch is gently patient, intimate and impossibly good. 

"Go to sleep," Arthur murmurs, and his free hand seeks out Eames's wrist and grasps it through the blanket. "You don't know what you're saying."

He does. There are things he wants to say now, while Arthur's hands are on him, now while he can see so clearly what he needs to do to make everything right between them. But Arthur's touch and the chemical accumulation of the last two days weave too powerful a net for him to escape. 

Arthur's voice is practically a whisper. "It's okay."

All he manages is a sigh before he's dragged down into sleep, against his will. It could be his warped sense of time, but he thinks that Arthur sits there a long while as he drops deeper. 

**


	7. Guns and Crime

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eames makes coffee and doesn't get what he wants.

Eames's involvement in dreamshare has been sporadic enough that he still thinks of sleep as a halfway pleasant bodily necessity – not work, not an art, not a trap – and his night in Arthur's guest bed turns out to be the perfect reminder of why he never wants to lose that. He dreams naturally, deep down, where all he consciously retains is a sense of peace and a lingering impression of exotic heat, and wakes up to find his mind refreshed, his hand no longer protesting, and the last piles of books neatly stacked in the bottom shelf. 

In the shower, he smiles to himself as he scrubs under his arms, between his legs. It's a matter of time. He knows what he wants, and he's confident now that Arthur's interested enough to give him a chance. The setbacks he has to overcome between now and then, the challenges to his creativity, the fleeting blows to his pride, are going to be worth it.

Though he briefly acknowledges Freddy's begrudging nod from the kitchen table, his attention slides straight over to Arthur, who meets his gaze, steady as ever, growing faintly amused as Eames holds it, past politeness, past awkwardness, and well into a declaration of intent. There, he thinks, as Arthur looks away with a smile. Maybe he could have done that all along if he'd guessed it was possible to earn himself that hard-won warmth instead of his usual reward of scowls and impatient rebukes. 

There's no coffee waiting for him on the bench, so he flicks on the kettle and runs the used cafetière left-handed under the tap. Today, he could handle anything up to and including disarming the front gates of CIA headquarters. The radio on the sill is tuned to one of Frank's racing stations when he switches it on. The commentary is tense with anticipatory energy.

He drums his fingers on the counter top while the rumble of the kettle grows louder. There's a delivery box on the table, a discarded catalogue, and a dozen plates of sample glass wrapped in cardboard and separated by foam ribs. By the time he notices what's in Arthur's grasp, the glass cutter has drawn a full circle in the plate and popped it neatly out. Arthur makes a note on the pencilled table in front of him. 

"That's good enough," Arthur declares. "The foyer is a little thicker but that won't be a problem."

Half-listening, Eames spoons grounds into the damp cafetière.

"You're consulting freelance now, are you Arthur? Get your fee upfront, the kid's got debts you wouldn't believe."

It's Freddy's lack of response that grabs his attention. Instead of a casual put-down wielded like a shove to demand his due respect, he's packing what's left of the glass samples hurriedly back into their box.

"Which foyer in particular?" Eames enquires, sitting opposite them. "Perhaps you can use another pair of eyes on this."

Where there might have been resentment, Arthur only shakes his head mildly. "It's under control, thanks. It's a foreign exchange desk, not the Normandy beaches." 

"That was on hold." Freddy's shoulders take on a defiant set, caused by more than just the sudden appearance of Eames's anger. "That was on hold until your mate the security guard can run the job himself. No kick-off until everyone has skin in the game. You nodded your head and said yes."

Freddy blusters. "Yeah well, he's been put on report, hasn't he? Supervisors breathing down his neck for a month – he can't put a foot out of line until the heat goes off him. We need a new guy."

"And the bill for your new mixing gear is due when?" Getting a glare for an answer, he turns to Arthur."I suppose he forgot to tell you the city police are five doors down. Anything goes wrong, you'd better have a chopper on the roof and a fast boat on the harbour."

"Are you advising me to look at a map before I go in, Mr Eames?"

Another time, he might appreciate the teasing in that. Instead, with a frustrated shrug, Eames goes to fill up the cafetière. Head-on confrontation isn't the way to manage a twenty-year-old full to the brim with testosterone and the reckless invincibility Eames remembers from that age, furiously grabbing at the grown-up respect that older men seem to get for free and take for granted. He can deal with it smarter. Watching the grounds settle, he makes a real effort to retrieve the glow of certainty he woke up with. 

Then Freddy says, "You want us all dead, man? If it goes wrong, we need someone quick on the trigger, get us out of there."

And that – both the casual-as-fuck risk-taking and the relegation of Arthur to the role of dumb gunman – pulls the equanimity out from under him.

"Kid, when it's odds-on you'll have to shoot your way out, that's not a con anymore. We call that armed robbery, and we leave it for junkies and bottom-feeders who can't aim any higher. Have a shot if that's the best you can do, but it's your own arse you'll be putting on the line. No-one else's."

His cousin leans back in his chair, contemplative. Eames isn't the one who loses his temper, ever. He's a ten-time champion in goading others into losing theirs.

With a clatter, he chucks the poured-out cafetière into the sink and burns his left hand trying to get his fingers through the cup handle. "I'm having your bedroom for a gym while you're doing time."

"Hi ho," says Frank from the doorway, sporting a neater cut and a slightly darker tan than when they parted ways in Hanoi. "Give the floor a quick sweep, there's a lad. I've just got my lady wife in a sweet spot, let's not throw away two weeks of shameless grovelling. Fridge empty at your place, is it Jim? Do make yourself at home."

Eames pulls him into a brief back-slapping hug, awkward with the coffee teetering in his cup.

"Talk some sense into your idiot son, would you?" he tells Frank with a grin that does a pretty good job of holding. "If you think he's worth hanging on to."

Frank stands in the doorway, assessing. "Ah me," he waxes nostalgic. "What's youth without a few stupendous cock-ups?" He glances at Eames's hand in surprise, as if none of his kids had kept him informed of the injury already. "A man's got to get his scars sometime." His attention darts to where Arthur has stood up. "And you must be the character who lured our James into Africa. Good of you to send him back in one piece. More or less."

Perhaps recognising the taunt behind his jovial front, Arthur answers coolly. "I wouldn't call him 100% to begin with, not after your Macau job. The Interpol report on that wasn't pretty. Let's hope your clients don't hear that the Chief Executive's kicked in a half million dollar reward for information on who put his wife in intensive care."

Eames can grin at that, holding up his free hand to show that none of that intel came from him, except what Arthur could read in the stitches from the basement window. What's the payoff for enduring the sting of Arthur's sharp eye and ever-critical judgment, if not to see it turned, every once in a while, upon more deserving victims?

Freddy's chair scrapes as he jerks it back to head for the garden, smokes in hand.

"The man has a point," Eames says brightly. "Maybe I'll steer clear of family jobs for a bit."

Frank is still laughing, having evidently deduced even faster than Eames did, years ago, that it's the quickest and most devastating way to get under Arthur's skin. It's easy-going Vinnie, always the dark horse, standing quietly in the hallway behind his father, who adds softly, "If you're offered any. Work's a bit thin since your little stunt in Kenya."

Eames puts his cup down with cool finality. "The burger joint at the train station has got a notice up, kid. If you need the work that bad."

Prioritising rapidly, he follows Freddy into the back yard and shoves him up against the garden wall, just out of sight from the kitchen window. 

"This job," he growls, forearm cutting into Freddy's throat as he struggles, his free hand keeping the cigarette end at bay. "You bin it. When your mate's in the clear, he can run it for you, but if you mix Arthur up in this, I'll tip off the cops myself. And Miriam, you don't go to her either. Clear?"

For a moment, he looks as if he might spit, but with a glance at Eames's expression thinks better of it. Eames knows better than to give anyone in his family a hair's breadth of room to give him the slip. He holds on until he hears the words "all right".

When he gets back inside, Arthur's stuff is all cleared out of the library and his taxi is disappearing down the street. 

**

Half of his prohibition turns out to be redundant because that same evening he finds Miriam ducking in with a cabin baggage suitcase and out again with an envelope folded into passport-sized dimensions. 

"Just an opening at MoMA on Thursday – purely recreational," she tells him dismissively, tucking the packet into her handbag. "And a little piece of investment fraud that might turn out a healthy income stream if the key men want to keep it under wraps."

It doesn't take much imagination to extrapolate out the likely source of that tip-off.

"You can't think he's giving you this for free," he prompts with a questioning glance. "Once upon a time, if a man tried too hard to get a foot in the family door, you'd have slammed it in his face. Now you've popped him in the spare room. He's got you all turned about, sweetheart."

"Me?" After a moment's scrutiny, she turns for the door, tugging her case neatly over the ledge of the front door step. "Look, I offered him a gig because it didn't seem to me he had a lot of friends left in your industry. A man's got to pay his debts. And not every family is as obliging as mine."

She cheerfully plucks two folded fifties from his shirt pocket.

"I like his work, Jim. He's not the type to make me turn the plan inside-out to avoid admitting he was wrong. He puts the job first, no ego." Eames has to indulge in a poorly-hidden smile at that, remembering the glares and brisk impatience and haughty silences Arthur has always used to assert his position on the team. On every job except the last one. "So sort yourself out by the time I get back, and if you're too sore to work with him, say so." 

"Yes thank you for that insight," he says sweetly, leaning on the door handle. "The only thing nicer than the ultimatum is your complete lack of faith. Which is being carefully noted for the next time you need someone to fly in and get you out of a military shipyard or a self-destructing Balkan crime syndicate." 

With her sunglasses on, her smile looks radiant, the smirk in her eyes all covered up. 

"Nobody spreads trouble like you do," she tells him, "when you're not getting what you want."

It's one of those arguments he feels it's smarter to let go of. Pursuing it would only confirm her unflattering opinion. 

"Bring me back a little Vlaminck," he demands casually as he's shutting the door on her. "Something bright for the kitchen." 

**

Frank must be unhappier than he lets on about Eames's run-ins with Opperman and Moorcock and the fact that the army contact they'd rushed out of their strip club hustlers in Hanoi hasn't come through, because not long after, Eames works out that the FX job is still on, and now with his uncle's blessing. A little well-placed eavesdropping tells him that Arthur has been casing out the site, no doubt hatching a brilliant plan to disable the entire city police force so they can make off with a few tens of thousands in foreign currency that's almost certainly marked and hard to dispose of.

He watches Freddy unpacking a crate of handguns from their storage locker on the wharves. The truth is, in a family as well armed and as vulnerable to revenge tip-offs as the Engelvins, real feuds happen rarely. Since Grandmother Margot lost her first and only son to a stray bullet when, on a rare outside job, his partners fell out over their cut of a take that came in short, she has dealt swiftly with the first tremors of discord in the immediate clan, prepared to banish anyone who defied her. 

When direct persuasion fails, covert sabotage works best, but with Charlie in a delicate stage of his con and his dad inside, Eames is flying solo against a devious opponent. When he calls Grandmother Margot to casually mention that her son-in-law is embroiling the family in the sort of job that would have turned her late husband livid, he finds out from Julie that, courtesy of Frank's generous purse, she's gone with Susanna and the newly arrived baby to a health spa in the Alps, where the prospect of phone contact is not optimistic. 

In the mid afternoon, Eames gets up on a chair and pulls out the wires on Arthur's security web. Forty-five seconds later, his phone rings, unanswered. Twelve minutes later, Arthur slides around the corner of the house into the back garden, gun drawn, deadly and invisible if Eames hadn't been keeping a close eye on his likely ingress route.

"Coffee's on," Eames calls through the window before anyone can get hurt.

From the grey suit and navy silk tie, he's been doing his recon in the guise of a corporate accountant or a merchant banker planning a holiday. From his edgy stride, Eames's little ploy caused him a bit more concern than intended. It's genuine, he thinks. 

"What's your cover?" he asks. "What I'm seeing is a well-heeled private investor scouting for development opportunities in countries with hard to get currencies."

Arthur's expression hasn't got a lot of patience left in it.

"May as well take a look then," Eames invites him pleasantly. "Now you're here."

Once he's steadied the ladder against the lip of the access panel in the ceiling, Arthur shrugs off his suit jacket and hands it to Eames. There's the faintly erotic process of unfastening his cuffs and rolling up his sleeves. The square 18 carat links are warm in Eames's palm as Arthur climbs up. The butt of the gun tucked into the small of his back rises past eye level, followed by the lean, long stretch of his legs, before he disappears into the crawl space.

"The smart thing would be put it off a month until the next pick-up," Eames begins off-handedly, climbing up far enough to watch him work. "Make sure there's no holes in the plan. If you need the money, my offer for those Cobol files is still on the table. Cash in hand first thing on Monday."

The torchlight slinks along the line of the wire, rapidly approaching the junction where the connection is pulled loose. 

"It's not about the money."

"Have you even met the whole team yet? If you don't watch it, he'll get one of his DJ mates sitting lookout, and then you're screwed."

"Yes I've met the team," Arthur replies testily. "They're about as – fucking hell."

He's found it then.

Eames presses on. "You blacklisted Belanova's entire crew the moment you found out he was mixing compounds without a degree. You threw away an entire job to avoid him. Now look at the company you're keeping."

When Arthur lays the torch down to work, the light catches his fingers, chin and cheek, as if to highlight both his dexterity and the determined set of his jaw.

"If this is a territorial thing –" Arthur breaks off to thumb at a particularly ragged connection. "If you want me further away from home, you're going to have to say it straight up."

"I didn't tell you to leave," Eames replies a bit too quickly. 

"No. You didn't." He frowns as he picks the torch back up and follows the wire to its destination, apparently satisfied. "Leave me out of your family politics then. I just want to do the job."

Going delicately on his tailoring, he crawls back to the ladder and descends, brushing off his knees, his usual industrious energy clearly turning towards the next task. Eames can practically feel the opportunity slipping through his fingers. 

"The reason I'm trying to talk you out of this job, Arthur, is that it stands a moderate to high chance of getting you killed, or put away, and I'm at a complete loss to understand why you would waste your not inconsiderable talents on a beginner level smash and grab with a payout you would have laughed at a month ago."

Candour is not a good look on him, he's been told. When he's in his own skin, he can't seem to make it sound like anything other than a particularly layered con. Mistrust is all over Arthur's piercing expression.

"Tell me, the casino in Macau. I've looked at the schematics and there's no way you had a clear exit the way you came in. Over the roof, was it? Or the basement. Under heavy fire, with a few hundred thousand in antiques on your back. You were badly patched up when I saw you. See, I think you make a pretty shitty case for playing it safe."

When he reaches for his jacket, Eames perversely holds it open for him, like a gentleman suitor. 

"Although it seems to have escaped your notice so far," Eames tells him as he reaches over Arthur's shoulder to flatten the right lapel with his neatly bandaged hand, "I have recently taken some fairly significant risks to keep you alive. Now, was--"

Arthur spins around, knocking Eames's hands off him, neat and fast-moving and suspicious. "Is that what you were doing?" he demands, inches from Eames's face

Eames, who remembers that last day in Kisumu as both a flamboyant act of heroics and his most embarrassing error of judgment, deflects the question with bland courtesy: "Was that a yes or no to coffee?"

"I paid you for those risks, Eames. Handsomely. You've got nothing to hold over me now."

Handsomely paid and lawfully dismissed contractor that he is, Eames can only steel his face into indifference and tell him, "I see. That's perfectly clear. I hope you won't mind if I fix myself a cup."

He pours out two while Arthur puts away the ladder with an irritable clatter, thinking Arthur's got a point after all. No matter how brilliantly satisfying it was at the time, the hand-in-glove synchronisation of their work in Kenya was a one-off triumph in a working relationship that has been a lot more troughs than peaks. In extraction, Eames has always been a lone operator – a contractor, never a partner. His strongest allegiances lie elsewhere, stitched in blood. Family is the first and biggest lesson in his life. 

But try as he might to remind himself of all the smug criticisms and supercilious brush-offs that blight the whole work history between the two of them, they seem old, petty, faded into impotence in his memory. A hundred times more vivid is the moment of Arthur leaping off the back of that truck under the railway bridge, latching onto the support of Eames's grasp without a second's hesitation. Arthur's hot, unthinking mouth after that record-smashing alleyway extraction.

In an industry dominated by the young and adventurous, sexual chemistry creeps into almost any team. Eames of all people should know how to spin it to advantage, not find himself muddled up like this. Buggered if he isn't meant to be the resident expert on beguiling sentiment to subvert good judgment. And yet it won't go away, this feeling of having lost something extraordinary, carelessly relinquished a partnership worth fighting for. 

Arthur draws the cup towards himself without lifting it, freshly scrubbed fingers fitting neatly into the handle. The silence in the kitchen is rare, cleared of the noise of the rowdy extended family. If only human psychology were really as simple as the pithy one-liners he reduces it to when they're plotting a way into a mark's subconscious. 

Watching Arthur, suited up into his usual unapproachable professional hauteur but lingering here in the family kitchen with his free hand open over the coffee grounds and the imprint of last night's sticky wine glasses on the countertop, he thinks it's a gamble worth taking, however long the odds might look.

"I'm not going to sink it," Arthur says matter¬-of-factly. "Not with the groundwork nearly done."

"My wide boy of a cousin – who knew he was worth that kind of loyalty?"

After a few more steadying sips, Arthur adds, "And you can stop talking as if I'm going to walk them all into a massacre. These guys don't know me. They listen to you." The steady glance he punctuates that with might look like a gently delivered request, on anyone else. "I'm going to nail this, Eames."

"Are you?"

Arthur's mouth and voice turn hard. "If you don't think so, you can keep it to yourself from now on."

He puts his unfinished cup down abruptly, brushes his pockets and straightens his gun behind him, as if to cut off any reply. Eames abruptly corrects a few misconceptions. Arthur is the prince of unassailable self-confidence, mercilessly tearing down inferior work on the unspoken assumption that his own is beyond reproach. Eames has never known him to care for someone else's good opinion before, and Eames's opinion has always been the lowest of his priorities.

It's kind of staggering, actually, that Arthur could imagine he'd be allowed to stay here, among the people Eames holds dearest; that Eames would keep on setting aside rule after hard-learned rule for him, if there wasn't at the heart of it a pretty incredible level of respect. 

"What I think, Arthur," Eames begins, unsure even as he pauses how far he's going to take that thought. "Is that even you can't hold this job together all on your own." 

Arthur knows security systems in all their limitless variations, sure. He can calculate the trajectory of a bullet and the likely damage it will do on impact. What he doesn't know is just how far a team member's actual ability can fall short of his bluster. Because Arthur's made his career working with professionals. Dreamshare is a natural filter: anyone who can keep it together through the trauma of collapsing skyscrapers and repeated violent deaths has got the sheet guts to fulfil their contract; the only unknown is unmeasurable aspects like loyalty. Whereas in Eames's trade, at the murkier end, the only entry test is being ready and willing to kick a man in the head until he stops moving.

He goes on, "It needs three men at the top of their game, and the other two –" He squeezes down the cafetière filter to give his focus somewhere else to be. "They're not exactly playing in the same league as you, are they?" 

Arthur watches him share out the last few drops of the coffee.

"You say that about your own family?"

"You'll see it for yourself in a day's time. If you're still determined to waste yourself on this joke of a heist."

Arthur's gaze flicks around the kitchen, as if he's finally got it. "All right, I'll bear that in mind," he frowns. "Thanks for the coffee."

There's a taxi still waiting out on the street – a rare indulgence in these parts that the grey suit and executive bearing must have won him. The suit jacket pulls into its perfect to-the-millimetre fit as Arthur fastens the buttons.

"No, I'm not getting private investor," Eames says, stalling him on the pavement outside. "You could be a low-key billionaire looking to invest in tax havens."

With a grudging smile, turned away as if to deny him any encouragement, Arthur replies, "I'm going in as the private secretary to a low-key billionaire. Come on. The exchange desk staff will only speak to me freely if I work for a living like they do."

There's a stripe of dust on the back of his shirt collar. He doesn't pull away when Eames reaches out to brush it off. The taxi driver goes on channelling his impatience into fiddling with the GPS.

Eames feels time running out. "Help me out here. Why aren't you cutting yourself loose?"

Arthur's chiding look says it all. In a practice run, Eames has seen him crawl up two flights of stairs with both legs off, just to make a point to an insufficiently committed team

"So it's a little risky. I need a better reason than that to go back on my word."

And Eames has one of those moments where everything comes together all at once. 

"If the groundwork's all done," he enquires quickly, "can you spare a couple of hours tomorrow?" He scrutinises the window moulding on the house across the street as if the answer couldn't be less important, but his heart is in his mouth. "I'm picking up a delivery from a chemist friend of Celine's out of town. Be good to have someone keeping watch topside while I'm testing the mix."

Wordless scepticism is one of Arthur's primary means of professional interaction. Eames has had more opportunity than anyone to master the art of weathering it. 

He makes himself breathe, slow, aloof, and looks Arthur in the eye. "Would you mind?" 

He likes that the suspicion hasn't faded from Arthur's face when he says, "I can give you until five. Not a second later."

"Of course," Eames tells him earnestly. "I'll pick you up at one."

He's got the phone to his ear the moment Arthur's cab goes out of view, working as hard and fast as he ever did for a six figure cash payout. 

**

One o'clock turns into quarter past two, by virtue of a few carefully engineered delays, including a phone call he says he has to put in to help out on Charlie's Bulgarian swindle. Arthur looks displeased and impatient when Eames picks him up from his hotel, stiffly zipped up in his black Italian leather jacket. But the gods of weather are on Eames's side, and the sun on the roof as they head north along the highway warms up the interior enough to strip off the first layer before Eames has finished embellishing on the reasons for his tardy arrival. 

Under the leather shell is that worn-in t-shirt in a pale shade of mushroom that turns the brown of Arthur's eyes irresistibly warm. It's a colour combination Eames committed to memory the first time he saw it, in Hanoi, as the sort of thing he might pull on if he wanted to make a mark fall for him without the slightest suspicion of having had his aesthetic judgment tricked. 

His passenger does not seem inclined to conversation.

"What's on your program after you wrap this job, then?" Eames prompts after they've cleared the last of the city. "I suppose Cobb will be back in the game now that you've cleared the air for him."

Word has got out about Amundsen's death, in a light plane crash over Lake Victoria along with rumoured quantities of cash and stolen Cobol IP. With the disappearance of his personal vendetta, no-one expects Cobol to pay out on the price on Arthur and Cobb, or wants to be associated with their treacherous employee. By the time he heard all this from Arthur's lips, he'd already researched it himself one weak-willed afternoon in Alexandria.

"Cobb's out," Arthur replies. "Permanently."

His hand balls on his thigh, as if resisting the temptation to pull his phone out for the third time and check it for new messages.

Eames laughs. "Sure he is. Until the first job offer hits him. Tell him it can't possibly be done and watch him jump in."

"He's out for good." Arthur jiggles the window down a fraction, up, down again. "You remember the shit he pulled on the Fischer job. I've never seen you quite so close to losing it. You know, I was making a contingency plan to lock him in the basement for the rest of the dream if you damaged him too badly."

Noting that the contingency plan wasn't for holding him back, Eames gives in to a smile.

"I thought you two were friends."

"That doesn't mean he's welcome on any team of mine. You said yourself, he's a liability." It's a struggle to recall that email exchange in Hanoi, so far away he can't reconcile it with the Arthur who's sitting next to him now, hair ruffling in the narrow shaft of breeze from the window. Arthur goes on, "This business attracts a type. When you take out the thrill-seekers, the addicts and the assholes, there's not that many left you could get to like." 

Eames considers a few different replies to that. But a gambler knows when to push his luck, and when to hold on to what he's got. He flips on the radio, to pause the conversation right there. Slowing up behind a lorry, he's deliberately less careful with his grip as he shifts down gears. The stroke of his knuckles along Arthur's thigh doesn't meet with any objection. 

He pulls over at a little bar he knows on the northern reaches of Aix-en-Provence, because it hasn't escaped his attention that, as soon as he's shaken off the burdens of a job, Arthur seeks out-of-the-way locations where he can make himself invisible and slip into local life.

"You couldn't have eaten at home?" Arthur frowns, but when they've rustled him up a bowl of fish soup he looks pleased enough, and a glass of Beaujolais leaves him positively sweet. 

"Saffron," Eames advises in response to the investigative expression Arthur has turned on his spoonful of soup. "We're only a few days' sail from the Mahgreb, and the city's a quarter North African by now."

"Yes, thank you," comes Arthur's typically dry rebuke.

"Just an assumption." Eames dips his finger cheerfully into Arthur's bowl. "A guy like you might not pick it, born and bred in the frozen north. I can't imagine Boston's a recognised centre of cajun cuisine."

The look Arthur shoots him isn't quite wary enough to break the bonhomie of a sunny afternoon's drive and a good meal, so he continues.

"Do you ever go back? I'm sure Professor Yoshida would be delighted to have a few field reports. Find out how her patented technology works in practice."

Very carefully, Arthur tears off a bit of bread, adds a neat smear of butter.

"How long did it take you to track that down?"

"It's not as though I've had many other demands on my time," Eames tells him, as if it had been a matter of an idle morning to trawl through the publication history of all the senior bioengineering staff in the three top US research universities so as to work out which ones had a conspicuous gap consistent with closely guarded research being pulled offline and appropriated by the military. Two professors, as it happened. Both at MIT. He's got a narrow range of dates, a broad sequence of events – all that eluded him was the names of the junior research students on the team, and the one in particular who dropped out a week later to bluff his way into the mercenary corps.

Arthur throws a couple of notes on the table without quite finishing his bowl.

"Should I be worried?" he turns around to ask as they go back out into the sun.

Eames steps around him, closes his fist hard on the keys in his trouser pocket and lets him stew until they're pulling back into the traffic. _Should I be worried,_ asks the man who over the last week has helped himself to almost every private fact about Eames he could learn, from his full name to the childhood trees he used to climb.

"Arthur," he says. "I'll pretend you didn't ask that."

**

"Guy named Amadio," Arthur breaks the silence a good while later. "Have you worked with him before?"

"Mate of my dad's." This will be Frank's doing then. Shoring up the inexperienced team with old hands from the family's past. "He's solid. Is he going in with you?"

Arthur shakes his head. "Behind the wheel."

A pivotal role, when it could come to navigating the city streets with a police pursuit and a shot team member bleeding out on the back seat. It's a good solution, but not good enough for Eames.

"I still say shelve it. Freddy's mate the guard, he's never pulled a job like this. He doesn't understand that half-arsed work gets you put away. He only has to be wrong about one thing, Arthur, and your mates in the diplomatic services won't be able to help you. Pissing off pushy foreigners is a national sport, here."

Eames navigates past the slow traffic coming in from La Brillane. "If you put it off until the next pick-up, I'll come on board myself. Make sure the young ones are properly supervised. You can take a thirty percent cut if you like."

"I thought you were too good for smash and grab, Eames."

"This is a one time offer. Go on. Call the boy. Tell him it's on ice."

For one heady moment, he thinks Arthur is going to do it – wash away the pattern of imperious rejections between them and utter that sweetest, simplest of all words, "Okay". Arthur slouches back in his seat, back of his hand over his mouth, thinking. Then he says:

"I don't think so. If that's the best you've got."

Eames taps his thumbs on the wheel and lets out a long breath, doing his best impression of a man plagued by frustration, who just played his last card and lost.

**

As Eames steers them from the highway onto the backroads, the traffic thins out and the lane markings disappear. At the sleepy little crossroads he turns north towards St Hilaire, down the neglectfully tarred road too narrow for two cars to pass, and finally up the unsealed driveway.

The front of the farmhouse makes a modest effort to disguise its true nature: there's a cluster of fir trees at the right hand end, a glimpse of the barn behind it with a single elderly rooster standing guard. Nothing about its serene simplicity suggests that the cellar is a chemical store and the outbuildings, often as not, populated by dreamers silently flouting the drug laws.

No-one answers Eames's knock, or his subsequent burst of shouting.

"That kind of chemist, is he? Likes to sample the merchandise."

"Now, now," Eames tells him. "Take a look around you. Does this look like a place that runs on military time?"

Jules is not a chemist after Arthur's own heart. Apprenticed in the party drug trade, he started his dream den in search of a more tractable, passive clientele and a reasonable chance of living out his thirties. Were they ever to meet, even Jules's nonchalant good humour might not hold up against Arthur's quiet, needling scorn.

"He won't have gone far. Come on, enjoy the fresh air. It might be your last chance for another seven to ten years."

His distinctly unamused look notwithstanding, Arthur does condescend to sit gingerly on the weather ravaged bench on the grass. The sound of a car engine gives Eames a moment's concern, but it passes them by. They talk about the aftermath of the job on Robert Fischer, who, having hived off the family's mining interests, is making a modest success of a new venture in solar technology, and pouring the rest of his earnest but ill-directed energy into his new Tasmanian winery. 

"I tried to keep you out of that, you know," Arthur says, attention flickering from near to far away. "It had disaster written all over it. But once he had Mombasa in his head, he wouldn't let it go."

When he finds out that Eames's alias is still connected on LinkedIn with a couple of the corporate team he worked with undercover at Fischer Morrow, Arthur, with an amused turn of mouth, tells him he'd better not be thinking of going straight. 

"That," Eames tells him, only just keeping the sourness out of his voice, "is not as far beyond my capabilities as you seem to think. Browning's Global Compliance Manager practically gave me an open invitation to work on her team."

The challenging stare is the one he usually catches when he's done something deliberately, maliciously provocative. Arthur rises from the bench and goes to straighten a strand of climbing rose that has long ago slipped free of its trellis.

"I'm honestly not surprised by that, Eames. I don't know where you got the idea that I would be."

Taking his cue from Arthur's impatient handling of the rose bush, he puts in another call to Jules. "Where's that?" he demands to Jules's prearranged silence. "Well make sure it isn't any later. We're on a deadline here."

"Twenty-five minutes," he replies to Arthur's unspoken question. "Customer with a bad reaction – he's waiting for the paramedics."

From the boot of his car, he retrieves one of the bottles he picked up at their lunch stop, and a couple of plastic cups which he rinses under a garden tap. "Might as well put the time to good use."

"In two hours," Arthur reminds him, "I've got a job that I'm told is pretty much a certain disaster." 

But it doesn't stop him steadying Eames's hand mid-air so he can have a leisurely read of the label before he drinks.

Lounging on the grass at Arthur's feet, arm draped over the bench behind him, it's all too easy to imagine he's already got what he wants, and this is just a lazy afternoon whiling away the daylight before bed. But he's got to steer them through a few tricky twists and turns before then, and Arthur might not be as willing as he hopes to let him do it.

"The way he tells it, he got his first PASIV direct from the CIA," Eames begins, nodding at the barn. "Ex field operations – it looks early to me. Probably one of the Guantanamo test models, I'd say." 

Arthur doesn't appear to have heard Eames's bait at all. He's tipped his head back to give him a view of the patchy blue sky. His right hand, for once free of any form of technology, is turned up, idly open, just by Eames's shoulder. If he turned his head and bit gently on a fingertip, he wonders how it might go.

"I wasn't at my best at the end of that job," Arthur says, sudden, bitter, his fingers curling in. "May as well get that out there while I can."

Remembering how, once he'd recovered sufficient mobility in his right hand a little, he'd filled some of the slow mornings in Alexandria with the image of Arthur scaling the wall of the admin block in Kisumu, Eames smiles into his cup and assures him, "Your second best wasn't too shabby."

"Don't be a dick about it. That – the exit strategy, you did what we agreed, overland to the coast. I was the one who went off the plan. I wouldn't let it happen again, okay? I'm not saying I don't make mistakes, Eames, but you're an idiot if you think I don't learn from them."

It's not the half glass of wine talking. The afternoon, clouding over, isn't lovely enough to lull a man into introspection. It dawns on Eames with slow discomfort that perhaps he's successfully spooked Arthur into believing this job might be his last. 

"Well, I like to think I'm not an idiot."

He used to think, before Kisumu, that Arthur didn't have a sexually impulsive bone in his body. Without dwelling on the details, he assumed a clear progression from attraction to friendship to bed, followed sooner or later by an amicable parting of ways. Now, he isn't sure how to read him. A kiss by ambush in a garden in broad daylight could go either way. He's never not _known,_ with women, who give him lingering glances and red-lipped smiles so that the only mystery is how long they mean to hold out before making good on what they both want. With men he's been perfectly content, until now, to ignore everything that wasn't an explicit and immediate verbal invitation.

"I want you in the car tonight." Arthur's tilting his cup, watching the light through the white plastic put ruby streaks in the last two centimetres of pinot. "I'd feel a hell of a lot better with you on board. I know it's late, but I can run you through the schedule on the way back. If I asked, would you do that?"

The soft appeal in his pretty eyes. The t-shirt he wore the night he kissed Eames out of nowhere in an alleyway. The quiet hillside. A resilient diagonal of sunlight catching the tops of the fir trees behind him. Eames thinks of a few reckless answers before he makes himself take a swig from his cup and reply,

"What, with my childish insubordination and my motherfucking inability to tell the difference between a plan and a piece of improv theatre?"

"I said that once," Arthur objects quietly. "After I'd just been thrown through a sixth storey window by a mob of your projections. Jesus, the things you remember."

Truth is, Eames is stalling to make sure he doesn't give too easy an answer and reveal that, as far as he's concerned, no-one's going to be in that car tonight, since the job is going down. 

But Arthur hasn't finished. "Do you remember how hard I had to fight to get you to come to Kenya with me? I had seven figures on my head, and I virtually begged you for help."

"Because Cobb couldn't get a babysitter," Eames snaps, resenting how sleekly that compliment works on him.

"Cobb? I was never going to take him on a job like that. Leaving aside his homicidal subconscious and flexible sense of loyalty, have you forgotten he's an architect by trade? Good with low emissivity glass, basic trigonometry and decorative fucking finials – not the man you want at your back when there could be a bullet around any corner. I had three things I wanted – someone who knew Cobol, someone who could do the work without getting any heroic ideas, and someone who could keep me together if I lost it. You were top of a list of two. And I paid - Christ, Eames, it's not like you ever made it easy. Not for one-"

Eames jolts when his phone rings, although he should have expected it.

"Look, I'm only going to say this once," Arthur hurries on over the muffled buzz from Eames's pocket. "You were worth the price. You're a stubborn, contrary asshole with an ego the size of a stadium, but I knew you'd – Will you answer the goddamn call?"

Fumbling out his phone, standing as he taps the screen, Eames moves away, tripping on a hidden rock and catching himself awkwardly as he goes.

"Where the fuck are you?" he demands, hardly needing to feign the irritation. He steals a look at his watch while he leaves a gap for an excuse-ridden reply. It's five minutes after five. He's supposed to have Arthur back in Marseille by now. "And if you don't come up with it?"

He turns back to Arthur, switching to English. "How much cash have you got on you? One of the paramedics recognised the symptoms. He wants a kickback if he doesn't put a call in to the police."

He shakes his head at Arthur's response and tells Jules, "You're on your own. And you'd better burn through your tyres getting back here, because when it hits five thirty, we're on the road and you'll be looking for another buyer."

Arthur throws the rest of his wine on the garden, the depth of his scowl reflecting how far off schedule they have got. The pick-up at the FX desk is at eight fifteen, but the way he understands the plan from Vince, Arthur needs to take out a security camera and do a good stretch of ground work first. 

Eames pockets the phone. "Look, I won't even sample the batch. We pick it up, we drive. You can afford a few more minutes."

"This is the last thing I need, Eames." He kicks at the remnants of the stone border of the path. "The job's dicey enough as it is."

This is more than just the stress of the delay messing with his plan. Arthur, before a job, is a paragon of calm, palpably smug with the anticipation of watching all his designs unfold exactly as intended. The only other time he's been this wound up was Kisumu, when the stakes were mortal and the odds ugly. 

"Steady on," Eames tells him, settling into the space Arthur has vacated on the bench. "It's all right, you won't be doing this job on your own."

Arthur gives him a sharp look then, finally, a nod. "At twenty five past five, you'd better have the engine running." 

He turns away to put in a call that sounds like one of his last-minute check-offs: curt question, then brief response, and a cool reprimand when the answer doesn't meet his specifications in every last respect. As he's lowering the handset to hang up, his attention – _finally_ – catches on the barn. A few moments later, Arthur's picking the padlocks with something attached to his keyring and disappearing inside. Eames gives him a few minutes before he follows.

**


	8. Jewels for the thirsty

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eames should be used to watching his plans go off the rails when Arthur comes into the picture.

The set-up has changed since Eames used to come here, a couple of years ago when he had first learned that a whole new world of high-end thievery was opening up and immediately started equipping himself with the marketable skills he would need to carve himself a place in it. The roof is propped up with new timber; the seeping gaps that used to plague him through the long hours practising his forgeries are sealed now. Six reclining armchairs in green vinyl form a circle around the machine. Jules has cornered the local market in recreational dreaming – bacchanalian bucks nights, anniversaries with an edge, and team-building programs for executives who want to know what it feels like to die. It's all that this out-dated PASIV – too bulky and prone to meltdowns for an extraction – is good for.

Arthur, however, has pulled back the fitted tarpaulin and flipped open the top cover. Noisy, clunky, over-heating dinosaur that it is, compared to its sleeker descendants, Arthur is detaching one of its serum receptors with tender care. 

"I did warn you it was an antique."

Arthur holds the receptor up under the fluorescent light, sparing only a sliver of attention from his examination as he says in a hush: 

"It's a bit more than that. The gamma model-" With the most delicate of movements, he unfastens a screw the width of a peppercorn and slides the electronic filter free from the glass casing. "-was never released outside military testing. Rumour says it produced a highly controlled environment – compliant projections, tolerance to manipulation of the dreamscape. Like all the original models, you could collapse the dream at will, without a kick. Technologically perfect. Except for the fact that it required a willing subject." 

In distraction, a wistful air has crept into Arthur's voice, and it's hard to marry up the reverence of his fingers with the memory of his steely grip on the trigger of a Glock. He turns the razor-sized sliver of circuitry on its back.

"And apparently this was the last model where they used my neurochemical transponder."

And there, on his knees under the revealing overhead light, is a glimpse of a younger Arthur, wearing the wounds of his government's treachery, his ideals poisoned and his first great passion stolen away from him. An Arthur about to cut free of every loyalty by which he'd defined himself – family, class and profession – and strike out on his own solitary path. Eames, who whether he wanted it or not has always had family at his back, sinks onto the nearest chair, under a ridiculous wave of protectiveness, and cups his hand beneath Arthur's as if he wanted a better look at the component.

"Fuck the bastards," he says. "As far as neurochemical transponders go, this one's a little beauty."

He gets the smile he wants, for an instant, before Arthur withdraws his hand and slots the circuit back into place. Settling back in the chair, Eames watches him reassemble the receptor and return it to its clip. The silence between them is easy as Arthur tinkers with the rest of the machine and Eames looks on with something between envy and anticipation.

"I notice the engine isn't running," Arthur says mildly without glancing up from his work.

"Why don't you try it out? There's a fresh dose of somnacin on the cabinet. We've got all the time in the world. I'll sort dinner out after."

The metal casing closes with a gentle click. "Eames, why isn't the engine running?"

He answers with a rueful quirk of his mouth. "Have I been too subtle about my opinion on the matter? I'm not going to let my idiot cousin drag you into his clusterfuck of an armed robbery."

There's reproach in Arthur's thin mouth, but no surprise, and Eames wonders exactly when he twigged to the ruse. It's bitter, taking advantage of Arthur's faith in his professionalism to coax him here. His proudest cons are the ones where what springs the trap is the mark's greed, or envy, or thirst for revenge: it's pure dramatic elegance to use someone's own failings to bring them down. When the lure is trust, he feels like a lowlife crook, not the artisan he was raised to be – and bang in the middle of a high-stakes job is not the most comfortable place to be reminded that treachery was there in the first human soul, alongside original sin. 

But betrayal can be a necessary evil. Arthur commits himself body and soul to every job he works, and there's no argument on earth strong enough to convince him to let the team down voluntarily once he's given his word. 

"Come on. It's not a bad alternative. A vintage PASIV. Rural tranquillity. Wine. Splendid company." Arthur doesn't seem convinced. "All right it's not the Metropole, but at least there's hot water." 

Getting to his feet, Arthur holds out his hand and says calmly, "Give me the keys."

"That would defeat the purpose somewhat."

"Eames."

"Not to mention wasting the embarrassingly large amount of time I've spent trying to keep you out of harm's way."

"For your own good-"

"That's just how I'd have put it, funnily enough."

While Arthur makes an unsuccessful attempt at forcing the driver's side lock, Eames fishes out the spare house key from above the laundry window ledge and sets about making up the bed in the spare room, which turns out to be a mattress on the bare floor. The whole place is a lot less rustic charm and a lot more lazy housekeeping than he'd remembered, but his whole career has taught him to grasp at the advantage in any situation. He hesitates with a couple of stunted candles in hand, decides that a little humiliation is worth the risk, and lights them on the window sill. 

From outside comes the smash of the car window – making him wince – and then the alarm, which cuts out after a few swift-fingered seconds. He listens in relief to the silence of the engine refusing to turn over. The vintage PASIV wasn't the only attraction of this region. It's a corner of the country where the family has never had reason to do any trade. Even Frank's contacts don't reach this far. If Arthur condescends to call for help, none will be at hand, and no taxi will take the long fare without sighting 200 euro hard cash which Arthur doesn't have.

But when he comes back outside, two wine glasses in hand, to his horror, Arthur has the bonnet up and is working on the engine. For a moment, Eames resents the scrutiny. With this car – registered in his real name and therefore never used for professional purposes – he's always been more concerned with keeping a well-tended gloss on the visible surfaces, inflicting neglect on what's under the bonnet.

He rests the glasses on the roof and comes around to observe. To his complete and utter lack of surprise, Arthur is deft and proficient in his handling of motor parts. He's been holding himself back all day, and Arthur is right there, bent invitingly at the waist. He slides his hand under the hem of that flattering brown t-shirt and rests it over Arthur's spine. For a second, the industrious repair work pauses.

"If your hands are idle, you can hold the goddamn flashlight for me."

Eames sighs and picks it up, dispelling the shadows that the low angle of the sun is throwing over Arthur's beloved mechanics.

Straightening, Arthur unrolls a length of copper wire he must have picked up in the barn. "So much for arcadian tranquillity. We were only inside for a quarter hour and look what some thug has done to your car."

The torch is suddenly warm in Eames's palm. How long, he wonders, before Arthur's rare bouts of teasing lose the ability to side-swipe him with unexpected desire?

"Look," he muddles on, unable to match the playful tone while Arthur's tinkering his way to slipping through Eames's grasp again. "This is all on me. Give it up, I'll take the blame for everything."

Arthur tests the length of the wire against the span he wants to bridge. "Kind of you, since it's all your fault."

The trace of his smile is still there, even while he's twining the new wire into the torn strands that Eames had only minutes ago ripped loose. He's not driven by anger, but he's still leaving. Even as he recognises the sound of opportunity, Eames is damned if he can work out the magic words Arthur is waiting for him to say. 

"Okay. So I'll put together something better. The bloke who got us the Macau heist does his main line in aerospace – both sides of the fence. There's always some young gun at the civilian end who'll empty his pockets to get an edge." Arthur doesn't even sniff the lure. "You'll call all the shots. Bring in Miriam if you want to. Even Vince. I'll get you the team you need." There's an emphatic snip as surplus wire is removed. "Split it 60/40 your way after expenses, whatever you like."

Patiently, Arthur pulls the wire taut across from the battery to the starter motor, testing whether the anchored end will hold to his satisfaction. 

"Is that what you're putting on the table, Eames? Whatever I like?"

He goes still, waiting for the answer, and something about his stillness signals Eames's pulse to kick up.

"I didn't say that," Eames hedges.

"That's a shame. Over here please."

He directs the torchlight onto a terminal on the starter motor. Arthur's still examining it when the phone buzzes in his pocket – probably Freddy wondering where the fuck he's got to. He reaches towards it.

"Would it make a difference if I was?" Eames asks quickly.

After an excruciating pause, Arthur's hand returns to the engine. "Quite a big difference, as it happens."

As the buzzing cuts out, Eames watches him wipe down the oil and dust on the terminal with a scrap of paper towel from his pocket and wind the wire around it as he goes on. "Those are the sort of terms I can work with. I'd even throw in the files I took from Amundsen's desktop, too. But you let me run the job, no questions, and it's 70/30."

According to Arthur's previous hints, the stolen Cobol information is worth a couple of hundred thousand to someone who pays with Saito's largesse. On the sort of job Eames had in mind, the deal would never add up to a profit for Arthur.

"Whatever you like?" Eames repeats. "For one job?"

"And before." Straightening unhurriedly, he takes hold of Eames's hand and repossesses the torch. "Starting tonight, as soon as the deal is closed."

The strength of his grip around Eames's wrist drives it home. His expression is frank and unapologetic. The shift in perspective is like a tremor under Eames's feet. His body reacts before his mouth can, heatedly. He watches Arthur's hard-working, reliable fingers pluck at the wire, which holds as if welded in place. 

"And don't bother haggling. This is a yes/no deal." Arthur drops the bonnet with a slam. "Well?"

A proud, fighting instinct reminds him that he has all the physical advantage here. He could sabotage the FX job by means of brute force, and Arthur's gun isn't in its usual place tucked against his back. But it's taken miles of travel, east to west and one hemisphere to the other, to get him to where he is now, and he's tired to the bone of conflict, of aimless pursuit, of misdirection and delay.

So he takes what could prove to be the worst in his long line of poor decisions on the subject of Arthur and, without even fleshing out the terms, he says yes.

**

From the silence that follows, it's pretty clear that Arthur wasn't entirely expecting that. He clears his throat, eventually, and splays his palm over Eames's chest: light, polite pressure through his shirt that seems mostly a test to make sure the terms between them are what he thinks. He uses it to hold Eames at bay when he leans in, impulsive with relief and fixated on the neat muscle of Arthur's neck just above the loose neckline of his t-shirt.

"I have to make a call first," Arthur tells him. "You should wait inside." He registers Eames's glance towards the newly repaired car and smiles darkly. "And you'll just have to have a little faith."

Eames, a con man by his one and only trade, lurks in the doorway until the conversation is done. It's quick: Arthur has never bothered with tact to spare the ego of a professional who should know how to bear up to setbacks. With a few mercilessly matter-of-fact sentences, Arthur deals the death blow to poor Freddy's ambitious plan. 

Arthur pockets the phone, stands for a few moments with his eyes on the jagged remains of the driver's side window, then approaches. Eames rifles through strategies for bluffing or charming or hair-splitting his way out of anything he really doesn't care for. Time was, he thought he had the measure of Arthur – predictable, uncompromising Arthur, who's reached him now, making him twist sideways in the doorway to let him pass. 

Arthur pauses astride the threshold, facing him so that Eames has nowhere to go but up against the open hinges.

"That," Arthur says with a distasteful pause, "was the sort of conversation I don't ever want to have again." 

And without any further preliminaries, he takes a slow grip on Eames's shoulders, pushes him back until the edge of the open door is jammed sharply between his shoulders, and kisses him. With one dry graze of lips by way of warning, Arthur's tongue is in his mouth, hot and bold, demanding everything he was promised. 

While he takes what he wants from Eames's mouth, strong hands hold him steady – and that, the physical assault, lights a fire in Eames, because nothing gets him going like a challenge and something about Arthur's hold is calling out the adrenalin he gets from a fist fight or the knife-edge tension of guns drawn in a dream. His body, recognising Arthur's lethal streak, responds with a potent mix of arousal and aggression that's all new.

This is not the Arthur who kissed him in Kenya with a death sentence on his heels. This time, he's in control, as measured in the all-too-brief grind of his hips as he once was in levelling off the vials for the PASIV, and Eames is practically panting for more. Out of nowhere, he bites. First Eames's bottom lip, sheer provocation that vaults onto the wrong side of playful, continuing along the line of his jaw and still an unexpected turn-on. As the assault moves down the side of his neck, he hooks his fingers into Arthur's belt loops and hauls him closer. 

"That's it," Arthur murmurs close to his ear – and that Arthur has a bedroom voice is disarmingly sexy all by itself. "Don't waste those big arms."

When Eames's palms slide onto the first subtle swell of his arse and pull them tight together, Arthur breaks away from his mouth, exhaling hard against his cheek. "Like that, yes like that." – and before he can lose the edge of desperation in his voice, Eames shoves back against him, rubbing his hip bone into the solidifying line of Arthur's arousal, defined through all the layers between them. And there's the feeling Eames recalls from Kenya, that even after they've done it all, his appetite will be just as yawning as when they began.

He runs his fingers up Arthur's spine, tracing the texture of vertebra easily through the accommodating t-shirt. With his arms sliding up to loop around Eames's neck, Arthur's slenderness is an intoxicating misdirection for Eames's instincts. The delicate, feminine span under his palm speaks to him of pliancy, while the strength of Arthur's hands keeps stirring up his defensive instincts. He wants to protect, he wants to attack, he wants to devour, and he settles for a lost kind of groan that's instantly silenced by Arthur's mouth slotting back over his own. And then, with a change of pace that works on Eames's balance like a loop-the-loop, Arthur's mouth turns gentle as he kisses down Eames's cheek, contemplative, indulgent, shuddery breaths brushing Eames's ear as if his control had slipped away. 

He thinks that in Hanoi, there was none of this. He'd been angry, bitter with the sense of being hired like a servant instead of asked like a friend, and he'd badly wanted to turn the tables. The memory strikes him of Arthur calmly shedding his shirt, a moment's hesitation on the button of his trousers, going down on his knees in his underpants with nothing on his face but blank concentration. He wants to say he's sorry, he didn't know. He wants another chance. 

"This isn't everything you want," he says, tilting free of Arthur's persistent attention. "Come on, let's have it."

He's ready to subdue his ego to the worst that Arthur has in store for him – though it might be harder in his own skin than when he's forging, the stakes are worth it. But Arthur just leans into him, letting Eames's chest take his weight as casually as any stretch of wall, while his nose traces idle, ticklish patterns against the grain of bristle in front of Eames's ear. He takes all the time he wants, leaving Eames to endure the hopeful beginnings of arousal where Arthur's thigh is pressed between his legs at an angle that he can't quite rub up against.

"What's the rush? The bird feed and water's topped up for two days at least. We both know your chemist didn't plan to come home any time soon. And you, Mr Eames-" He bites provocatively into the shoulder muscle, sharp teeth blunted through the shirt. "-have promises to keep." 

For a moment, Eames has to close his eyes and get a grip on where they're going. It's still new territory, this playful side he's never seen for more than a swiftly quenched moment before. Arthur has always been the straight man, a fortress of predictable, polite contempt against which Eames could mount a relentless campaign of half-meant taunts and challenges. Now, when he's the one being teased, he can't quite find sure footing.

He hooks both hands behind Arthur's hips and pulls them tight together. All it takes is a few seconds of long-awaited pressure to get Eames hard enough to be obvious through all the layers between them. The jerk of indrawn breath tells him it's not gone unnoticed.

"Not like you to be indecisive, Arthur. I've got some ideas if you can't make up your mind."

Arthur grinds up against him wholeheartedly for a few delirious seconds, locking them into a last furious kiss, before he pushes away. On his face is the fierce determination of a job on the brink, "Where the fuck is the bathroom in this place?"

"Second on the-" He's gone before Eames can point. 

There's barely time to secure the door, relight a dead candle and get his shirt off before the shower cuts out. Pausing just outside the guest bedroom, stray drops of water still sliding out from under the towel to wind their way down his calves but his hair barely even steam curled, Arthur's sense of urgency has only escalated. With rough, efficient hands, he jerks Eames's trousers open to rub him through the negligible obstacle of his underpants, rapidly refuelling the desire that had never really diminished from before. The firm strokes are typical focused, authoritative Arthur – but there's another story in the pained-looking lines on his brow and the parched sound of his voice:

"You're going to use your mouth. I want -that."

Eames leans in to kiss him by way of a foretaste, languid and wet. "No surprise to find that on the agenda."

He wants to do it with Arthur standing up, no handholds so his every wobbly moment of pleasure is on display. It takes a sharp tug to pull the well secured towel free. The visceral quiver as he bends to get down on his knees is mostly anticipation.

"Wait, not - no." Arthur's hand beneath his chin guides him back up, and the touch lingers as Arthur looks over his face for the answer to some unasked question. After a couple of breaths, he moves them both towards the bed. "Come here."

Stripping off the last of his clothes, Eames gets down on the mattress beside him. Naked, Arthur's ribs display the shakiness of his breaths, and his dick is already filling out from his body, flushed and untouched. Impatient, he leans in and licks across Arthur's nipple, again and again as it hardens for him and draws out a gruff, surprised murmur. Just then, he doesn't care what they do, so long as he has Arthur's unqualified attention for every second that they're doing it. 

"Here," Arthur twists over onto his hands and knees, directing Eames down the bed with firm pressure on his shoulder. "God, here-"

Realisation brings him to a standstill. This would never have crossed his mind as the first thing a man might ask for when offered his every wish. He puts his mouth low down on Arthur's spine and bestows a half-hearted kiss, delaying. It's just skin, he tells himself. Clean skin, freshly washed. 

"Eames-"

It sounds more like a query than a reprimand. Eames rests his forehead on the tense muscle at hip height and strokes his thumb experimentally down the hot, intimate flesh between Arthur's cheeks. If the point was degradation, there are crueller ways to make it. Arthur could be fucking his throat right now, making him gag until his eyes watered. Instead, his face is bent right down to the pillow, opening up his body so that Eames could hold him down with barely more than a firm hand on the back of his neck. 

He takes a deep breath and flicks the tip of his tongue over the clench of Arthur's entrance. 

"This is what you want?" 

A long, shuddering sigh answers him, as if Eames had given him a lot more than one hesitant swipe. 

"Yes," Arthur says in what feels like the sweetest, unsteadiest tone of voice Eames has ever heard on him. "Go on, yes, go."

And those few yearning words are all the encouragement Eames needs. Once he's got his mouth wet, he goes back to work with the flat of his tongue, licking great, hungry strokes like he might do on a woman who liked it a bit wild. If Arthur doesn't moan for him, his silence is just as eloquent, delicately balanced as if the slightest wrong move might bring the pleasure to an end. It's only when Eames slows his pace and starts to press in that he wins himself a sharp exhale with a low vibration of voice in it. 

He pushes forward, advancing his hands along the sheets, and presses his whole mouth down in an obscene kind of kiss. Clean skin, he tells himself. Clean skin and a lot of Eames's spit, and deeper in it's smoother going and so sensitive that Arthur's whole spine jerks with every stroke. He's never had any reason to think about it before, but of course what he's licking into is muscle. It contracts into a solid wall when he shoves in hard and sudden, but as soon as he turns gentle, he can coax it loose again. He slows down, licks a slow line up over the grooved skin around one side of the cinch of muscle, down the other, feather light so that he can watch the tortured spasms run through Arthur's flesh right up to his shoulder blades. It's a little miracle, the way he's got Arthur on a hook, and the hook is as simple as his tongue, and it was Arthur who showed him how to do it. 

He pulls back, replacing his mouth with the pad of his thumb tracing over Arthur's hole in the same tantalising rhythm. Arthur looks wrecked, head lying on his folded arms, both fists clenched. His face is all screwed up, as if submersing himself blind in the sensation of it. He appears delicately balanced between agony and bliss and Eames decides then and there that he's going to practise this until he's up to the best Arthur's ever had; until he can make Arthur's knees weak just by whispering the promise of it in his ear. 

"What are you doing?" Arthur murmurs, lips barely moving and eyes still shut tight under his frown. 

Eames could go down on a woman all night – has done, gets off on the filthy permissiveness of splayed legs and delicate folds of tender flesh spread open for him. On a man, on Arthur, where he'd never expected to find the same helpless reactivity, it knocks him silly with eager lust. 

"Turn over."

Arthur's eyes finally open, battling to focus, as if he'd been heavily drugged or beaten about the head. All that from Eames's inexperienced mouth on one sensitive part of him. His delirium is infectious. Eames wants to please him, wants to keep him tongue-tied and befuddled.

"Come on," he says, accompanied by a shove on Arthur's hip, until he finally twists himself around onto his back, the nape of his neck angling awkwardly against the wall. Before he has a chance to settle, Eames is pressing his thighs apart, pushing them up and back with very little resistance. And that's more like what he knows: the heady invitation of legs thrown wide, the lovely curve from waist to splayed hips to buttocks, and the sheer exhibitionism of making eye contact as he goes down. This time, he can observe Arthur's dumbstruck expression as he lowers his mouth and bestows a slow, obvious kiss. 

"Oh jesus-" Arthur murmurs in a distant, stunned kind of voice as his fingers brush through Eames's hair and go limp again. He watches, spellbound, as Eames kisses lightly behind his balls and slowly moves back down. With excruciating gentleness that barely makes contact, he switches the point of his tongue back and forth, barely skimming the heated skin around Arthur's entrance, until he can feel the desperation in the strain of his thighs. He takes mercy on him then, bends down to eats him out properly, indulgent and deep like he was hungry for the taste of it, as if the pleasure was all for Eames. He hears a soft sigh, quickly stifled, and doesn't need to look up to know that Arthur's eyes have drifted closed again. 

"Stop," Arthur says, hitting his habitual note of professional command so perfectly that Eames's libido is goes into freefall. Then he continues, slurring with urgency, "I have to fuck you. Tell me you had the-"

Already going for the supplies he laid in the top drawer, Eames tips the box on the tabletop. Watching Arthur tear open the condom packet with the familiarity of uncapping one of his everyday felt tips, Eames succumbs to doubt. Keeping his side of the bargain is only a matter of bruised pride and low-level flesh damage, and he's not about to break the deal. It's only that he's never wanted to bury himself inside someone quite so badly as he wants to do to Arthur right now. When his blood is all but boiling, it's cruelly impossible that Arthur doesn't seem to want it the same way. 

Since he doesn't trust his own hand to intervene, he can only look on, heart in mouth, as the condom comes free. With obvious effort, Arthur meets his gaze, his dark eyes full of focus and heat. And competence. Just like that, the disappointment and doubt wash away.

"Lie down then." Arthur's voice sounds dream-like and slow as Eames slides down onto his back among the loose, slippery old sheets. His own heartbeats seem a long way apart. He can take it this way – he's in the best possible hands. The only thing he couldn't take is to stop. 

Then Arthur reaches for him and in what seems to his endorphin-drenched mind like a single fluid sequence, strokes him hard in a matter of moments, rolls the rubber onto him, makes short work of the packet of lube, then climbs over Eames's hips and sinks down. Heat, shocking heat, and the determined clench of Arthur's muscles resisting him and trapping him all at once. It's a hundred times more intimate than he ever thought. The _permission_ of it is extraordinary. He wasn't ready – didn't expect to get here so quickly, should have planned out how to go about it. Instead, he's gulping down groaning breaths to clear his head, lying overwhelmed with sensation as if he'd never got his end in before, as if- 

"Eames."

Arthur's half-groaned reprimand seems to come from a long way off. When he drags his eyes open, there's Arthur, palms splayed over Eames's lower ribs as he rocks and clenches tentatively, adjusting to the length inside him. His hair is a sweaty, distracted mess over his forehead, his mouth open and – come to think of it, both of them are panting loud enough to hear out on the driveway.

"Put your hands on me. Use your goddamn hands." 

With the speed of a man who's finally worked out the art of motion, Eames happily complies. Arthur's dick is plump and hot with blood, but still a little pliant in his grasp at first. He likes that, relishes the physical evidence of arousal growing before his eyes. He gives the shaft a few slow strokes, tugging up and out firmly as the length of it stiffens just for him. He circles the pad of his thumb greedily over the head until Arthur's fingers curl into his skin, pleading wordlessly for more. And through it all, there's the responsive flex of Arthur's body around his cock, squeezing tight under the influence of each stroke, so overtly filthy he has to work hard on the simple act of breathing.

Arthur rides Eames's cock with tiny, rhythmic undulations of his hips, draws a tortured breath when Eames's free hand reaches out to finger his balls. His hands stay on Eames's chest like he needs to be held down, and under his palms the skin is wet and hot, the nerves ablaze like in all the places their bodies are connected. He can feel the state of Arthur's arousal building everywhere – hot in the clutch of his fist, in the clawed fingers at his ribs, in the helpless contractions where he's driving Eames into him – and it feels like the kind of explosion that's going to hurt. But in the end, when Arthur gives it up, he misses the hot spurt of it because he's watching the overcome flutter of Arthur's eyelashes and the impossibly sweet parting of his damp, flushed lips that Eames's would kiss in a moment if he weren't being held down like a dangerous animal with all the remaining strength in Arthur's body.

Eames puts his frustration into his fingers, cinches them tight and milks until Arthur's dry and shivering, head bowed in exhaustion. Finally, he kind of crumbles forward until his forehead is resting under Eames's collarbone, his hot, panting breath stirring up a frighteningly interested nipple. The new, awkward angle draws his dick slowly out: he can't hide the disappointed shudder when it slips free.

"Arthur-"

Though his aim was patient rebuke, he must strike the wrong note because Arthur raises his head to look at him, reading his face closely like there was something he'd missed. 

"Yeah okay." He breaks into a smile, hides it against Eames's cheek as he kisses him there, adds a few more in distraction. "Don't expect too much. I can barely-"

The end of the sentence vanishes into a flash of helpless dimples, and Eames is bloody well going to play it differently next time, so he can keep Arthur on this delicious, just-fucked high for as long as humanly possible without the distraction of his own uncomfortable needs. 

His dick jumps with interest as Arthur carefully strips off the condom and chucks it in a wad of tissues into the bucket that passes for a bin. After the synthetic texture of rubber, Arthur's fingers feel electric running softly up and down the length of him, hot and human. With a glance full of promise that drives Eames crazy when their eyes meet, Arthur bends down to suck the head into his mouth, wet insides of his lips dragging intimately over every needy contour. A few more tantalising shallow sucks, a flicker of tongue, and the sight of Arthur's sweetly bending shoulders blurs before him. He'll take anything right now – hands, mouth, he doesn't care. 

It's over pretty quickly. Arthur shifts around to rest his cheek on Eames's stomach and works him by hand in long, thorough strokes. He leans down every few tugs to lick the head of his cock clean, and the inevitable result of that position is so stupefyingly hot that all Arthur has to do is press a kiss to Eames's abdominals and murmur "Go on-" and Eames is shooting hard, arcing up above them both and then catching on Arthur's lips and cheek as he nuzzles in closer.

He thinks, as Arthur trails his tongue up Eames's chest to brush their lips damply together, that it's a good thing he never guessed it could be like this with men as well, like he's submersed in pleasure way over his head, because he had enough trouble in his early twenties keeping his shit together over one woman or another, and god only knows what sort of madness he might have got up to if he'd added men into the mix, and not known who he wanted to fight and who to fuck. 

Arthur stretches out next to him, extending all those neat lines of naked skin. They've got the house to themselves until mid-afternoon tomorrow, which was the best he could negotiate at short notice. He rubs his sweaty face with both hands and wracks his brain for any leverage he might grasp to make Jules stay away indefinitely. 

**

His body uncomfortable and irritated at the idea of sleeping with the sun barely set, he leaves Arthur flaked out on the bed, and goes to see if Jules has made good on his promise to leave something resembling food in the kitchen. There's eggs, potato, a bag of onions under the sink, Spanish olives in a tin, but no milk to speak of. When he goes to seek Arthur's opinion on making up the difference with butter, the empty bed gives him a start, before he catches the clank of the shower starting up again. "Hey," he calls through the half-open bathroom door, thinking how if he weren't so hungry he might take up the implied invitation, thinking how sweet it is to have the luxury of letting the opportunity go by for a few hours at least, "It's frittata or nothing, I'm afraid."

"Sure." He sounds like his usual, resolved self again, even as Eames is struggling to keep his hold on the egg carton. "Did you see there's parsley growing under the kitchen window? Mint by the garden bench."

The pan is only just warm when Arthur emerges, back in his day clothes. Eames is whisking eggs with a fork. 

"Goddamn," Arthur says from the doorway. Just two faltering syllables, coupled with his fixed attention skating over Eames's naked upper half, and the spark when their eyes meet has Eames twisting off the gas, striding over to him, hands gripping hard on his shoulders then sliding up to his jaw to hold him still for a kiss that's already half way to fucking. There's no retreat in Arthur – Eames likes that, really likes how he's rubbing himself up against Eames, not just his cock but his chest too, one hand grasping Eames's arse cheek through his jeans, the other groping to get a grip on his back. 

To Eames's unexpected delight, Arthur wants to fuck again, this time up against the wall of the spare bedroom, slow and deep on a tricky angle, Arthur's lovely hands splayed and clenching against the paintwork. The position's magnificent for a second round, Eames discovers. Leisurely, intimate with his nose trailing up into the damp border of Arthur's curls, where he can bite the nape of his neck and make him sigh. 

"Slower," Arthur says, arching back so that Eames's kisses can dip onto his cheekbone, down over his jaw to suck bruisingly at the base of his neck. "Make it last."

Eames presses his face into Arthur's shoulder, grasps him hard around the middle and grinds to a halt. "There is no way on earth-" He has to pause, breathe deep, get a grip on himself. "That 'whatever I want' includes things that are physically impossible."

"Sure it does," Arthur tells him, working his neck to brush their mouths together. "I want to find out how long I can take this for."

Which is not, it turns out, all that long, once Eames has got the motivation to push him. After a lovely series of experiments with position, holding Arthur steady around the waist, he finds an angle that earns him a shudder with each stroke, and a minute after that, when Eames is hammering him hard and barely holding himself back, Arthur gives the sort of cry, from the depths of his throat, that belies every disciplined line of his deportment and spatters the wall with come. Desperate not stop, Eames thrusts up into him, riding the contractions, his arm squeezing Arthur's waist and his face buried blindly in Arthur's shoulder as he begs silently for a few more seconds, because he surely won't get another round of this, and he can't give up the hot depths of Arthur's body. If he doesn't come, he'll die of it. He has to have- Just a few more-

"Come on, come on." Arthur's voice is ragged, strained. "I want to feel you." 

The low sound that comes out of Eames's mouth, in the teeth of an orgasm that feels like being upended in the wild, pounding froth of a thirty-foot wave, is a whimper in everything but pitch. He bites down on Arthur's shoulder weakly and lets it out, lets it sweep him up and away until his senses are giving him nothing but static, shivering pleasure and static. And then, on the other side of it, he can only rest his cheek against the imprint he left in Arthur's skin and hold himself up by the desperate grasp of his arm. Arthur shifts uncomfortably. 

"All right," Eames murmurs, staying exactly where he is, clutching every last second, disorientated by the ringing in his ears. "All right."

Arthur's soft laugh vibrates in his forearm, in his chest. It's a new sound, stripped raw and private, nothing like the casual amusement he'd been so jealous to see graced upon Miriam or Faiza. It doesn't make him want to let go. 

"All right," he repeats, and eases himself free. He pulls the wet towel off the door handle and passes it over to save Arthur having to give up his exhausted slouch against the wall. It's impossible to take his eyes off the clumsiness of Arthur's fingers trying to tuck it around his waist. Arthur, who can make the PASIV disappear into its case in a blur of practised precision. He wonders what it's going to take to drain the seemingly bottomless pool of lust that this weird, protracted pursuit has built up in him. An hour for dinner and the rest of the wine bottle, then maybe they can push themselves to one last- 

Arthur staggers two steps and collapses on the bed. The overhead light on his white back displays all the marks of Eames's hands and mouth, over the fading shrapnel scars. He looks like he's been mauled by a wild beast. "I want fresh bread and coffee in the morning," he sighs, muffled into the pillow. "And a fucking spa bath."

"Anything else?" Eames asks, already imagining him sprawled out in broad daylight with Eames's mouth between his legs.

He gets an honest to god groan. "Keep your hands off me." Arthur rolls his head enough to give him a look that's accusing and hungry all at once. As his attention descends as if unwillingly down over Eames's naked body, he turns away with another groan. "Where the fuck did that come from? You were never that interested. It was all about your festering old grudges – screwing me into the toughest deal you could get. And now you bring that out." 

A shudder goes through him like his body wasn't quite done with coming. The long stretch from bare back, arms with the lick of hair beneath them, down to where his lean hips are swathed in the towel, seems absurdly vulnerable for a well defended man like Arthur. 

"Your powers of persuasion," Eames tells him light-headedly, taking a firm grip on the door handle, "are a little above what I expected."

**

The smell of a pretty well improvised frittata can't rouse him, but some time in the dead of night, Eames wakes up to an insistent thigh parting his legs from behind and Arthur's hand closing around him. With a vague grunt of protest, he shrugs the touch away, clinging to the rival caress of the most delicious deep sleep he remembers having in a while. Distantly aware of the first hot swell of arousal pressing against him, he's also staging a half-conscious rebellion against the terms of their deal. 

Arthur jerks as if just coming awake himself and pulls back. "Sorry." 

But the sleep he tries to drift back into no longer feels lush, spoiled now by the distraction of something lacking. 

He rolls onto his back so he can fish out Arthur's hand and draw it onto his chest, because although he may not be in the mood to fuck, he's not immune to the charm of Arthur wanting to. Unexpectedly compliant, after a moment's pause, Arthur just opens his palm flat and makes himself at home with Eames's body, squeezing the muscle indulgently. He traces a slow, curious path over his pectoral, one side to the other as Eames's nipple starts to peak into his touch. He teases it between his fingers for a few idle moments before sliding his attention down over Eames's rib to thumb at the dormant bulk of his abdominals. And there, pleased and flattered and lulled by the first shallow ripples of arousal, Eames falls back to sleep.

**

When he gets back in the morning, Arthur's showered and dressed, sitting cross-legged on the unmade bed with his laptop open. He looks a little puzzled as Eames throws the paper-wrapped loaf of bread on the bed and sets down a cardboard coffee cup.

"As requested," Eames says as he unplucks the laces of his shoes and tosses them towards the table where his socks are still lying from last night. "The car wouldn't start, you know."

"Of course not. Uninsulated wire loses too much electrical leakage – there's no way you'd get a strong enough charge." The manipulative bastard is grinning at him, all dimples and unattended bedhead and bare feet. "Looks like you found the missing parts, huh?"

"Never know your luck," Eames says, stretching out beside him. 

He looks damp and warm from the shower through yesterday's thin shirt. Before he can reach for his breakfast, Eames leans down and bites the top of his thigh through his trousers, as high as he can reach. There's an unequivocal tightening under his mouth. 

"I'm going to give that PASIV a spin," Arthur says, frowning at his screen. "Since we have time."

Eames kisses the same place, breathing warmly through the fabric, tilting his head to shoot up a thoroughly undeterred look. He nudges his head in closer, towards the just-out-of-reach zip and the tempting outline to one side of it. 

The laptop abruptly closes. "Or it can wait," Arthur says urgently, and it does.

**

A few tubes of pre-mixed somnacin with mismatched stoppers are standing up in a recycled pickle jar on Jules's work bench, among a scatter of yellowing tabloids and a solitary copy of New Scientist stamped with cup rings. He waits for Arthur's scepticism, the inevitable inquisition about Jules's history, whether Eames trusts his work, what hard evidence he has upon which to base that trust. But Arthur merely switches on the machine, testing the vibration of its components as they warm up, feeling the flow of air at the vents.

"You should come down with me," he tells Eames, two doses in hand. "Give me a few seconds to make sure it's stable and then follow me in."

It's been weeks since the practice runs they took together in Kisumu, which had been functional and short with no-one to keep watch topside. Eames locks the door. "Sure."

Arthur goes carefully with the mechanics as he slides the somnacin into the receptors, his work uncharacteristically slow as he makes up with unwavering attention for the unfamiliar quirks of the older prototype. Once he's kinked Eames's IV line to provide for the initial entry delay, he hesitates even over the routine act of inserting the needle. 

"All right?"

Arthur spares him a fleeting glance, then puts the point against the inside of Eames's elbow. "This is kind of new for me."

Eames shuffles a bit in the green vinyl. "It's not all that different from your model, once you're under."

"Not the machine." 

It doesn't hit Eames until a bit later, inside the dream, when he finds himself searching Arthur's face to figure out whether he really has made himself a few years closer to his college age or whether the impression of youth is entirely born out of the naked excitement in his eyes, that it's not quite business as usual for him either. Since Celine, he hasn't gone under with a single person who was anything more than a highly skilled associate. Dreamspace has been a workspace, nothing more. He wants, as he's never wanted before, to play.

Arthur's dreamed up his usual scenario: an office space, the scale and finish of an investment bank, with a winding central staircase detached from the surrounding floors which ends in a Penrose loop beneath their feet. 

"They got it right," Arthur says, running his fingers reverently along the stainless steel crown of a banister. "It feels good. Better than I remember. That's the one thing Army Research fixed up – our levels always had hazy patches outside the dreamer's focal point."

Arthur draws an unlikely gun from the sleeve of his suit jacket and points it at the ceiling. The crack when it fires hurts Eames's eardrums, but before it can make contact, the bullet loses momentum, crests at an absurdly low height, and drops harmlessly back into Arthur's palm. A couple of projections turn their heads in curiosity and go back to their business. 

Eames hasn't used this machine since the very early days of his career. It hadn't occurred to him how different it is from the later models he switched to as soon as he grabbed the first paid job he could talk his way into. In those days, he'd never seen a colleague's arm torn from the body in an awful mess of tendons and muscle by a furious mob of projections. Never known what it felt like to put a gun in his mouth and force his unwilling fingers to pull the trigger. When he used this PASIV, he'd gone in alone to put on other people's faces, not to bend the laws of physics.

Now, it's like finding his way back to a technological garden of Eden. The difference is like winter and spring. The crackle of hostility has vanished from the air, from his nerves. There is no resistance to his presence in another person's dream, no resistance at all.

Arthur glances into the void framed by the staircase and hands his gun to Eames. "If this goes badly, I might not be in any state to get myself out."

Barely upsetting the fitted lines of his waistcoat, he vaults over the banister and into the four-floor drop below. For an instant, he's in freefall, arms loosely raised as the air ruffles his sleeves. And then his descent slows, as if invisible strings were pulling taut, as if he could hold himself off the floor by will alone. He lands gracefully on the marble below with nothing more than a crisp click of heels.

When Eames dreams up an apple and drops it, gravity steals it away as insistently as ever, and he can't even feel the theoretical threads he could pull to alter its trajectory. Arthur catches the fruit, smiling, and tosses it effortlessly four storeys up. "Imagine it's a part of you. Not an object. Everything down here is made out of neural impulses. The apple's no different from your hand."

On the third attempt, he gets it. As Arthur catches the floating apple, it swells into one of the red balloons from the sky over Hoan Kiem Lake and floats away. The potential is suddenly enormous beyond his grasp. After the hard discipline of curbing his creative efforts to the occasional desperately needed key, rope or firearm, now he can re-shape this whole world as freely as he transforms his own flesh and blood, without the price of bodily destruction. 

He jumps.

"Go on," Arthur says a few moments later, when Eames has landed beside him grinning and giddy with possibilities. "I've never seen you build."

He's still adding turrets among the clouds when the timer runs down. 

**

"Useless for interrogation, though," Arthur says topside, focused on the used needles he's detaching from the lines. "The subject can move a window or bring down the roof without even knowing he's doing it. If he starts to suspect he's dreaming, it's pretty much Armageddon. The army couldn't use that, obviously." 

For the first time, he can see the other future that Arthur might have had, if his project had come to fruition. Legitimate, respected, feted, a tech prodigy giving interviews and keynote speeches across the world. Smiling next to Professor Yoshida on the front page of a newspaper, hair unslicked, youthful shoulders not yet set into the strict lines of professional tailoring. Travelling, through an unrecognisable dreamshare industry, a promising upward path that would almost certainly never have intersected with Eames's. 

Arthur switches off the PASIV. His hands have acquired a different history. He knows how to jemmy a door, how to ransack a mark's purchase history, fake a passport, bribe a border guard, ditch a persistent tail. He lives like they all do, with one hand on his totem and one eye on the door. 

Eames tells him, "The army didn't have a fucking clue, did they?"

He lets Arthur wash out the tubes in the sink before he traps him against the work bench and jerks him off, slow and sweet and left-handed, with his mouth over the escalating pulse in Arthur's neck and the fingers of their right hands tangled together above the bandages on the chemical-stained wood. Arthur laughs, like he thinks it's just the demands of Eames's insatiable libido but can't bring himself to mind, and lets Eames do what he likes. His amusement subsides afterwards, when his hand on the zip of Eames's jeans finds practically nothing in the way of arousal. He licks Eames's fingers clean instead, leaving tingling lines of sensation with the tip of his tongue, and by the time he's finished Eames is more than ready for his mouth.

He kisses Arthur against the bench when he's got up off his knees. All the heat and thrill has gone out of it now – Eames has got nothing left in him to wring any more pleasure out of, but he hasn't quite done with wanting. Until now, Arthur's personal space has always been inviolate, fiercely protected with pointed elbows and dark briefcases clutched like portable barricades. The room outside a two-foot radius from him just doesn't seem to hold any interest for Eames this morning. In a couple of hours, they'll be back amongst the distractions of his family in Marseille. He slips his palm up under Arthur's shirt, clasping the muscular curve of his waist, thumb bumping over his lower ribs before he slides it around, settling a good way up the spine so that Arthur has to adjust his arms to fit closer against him. 

Arthur twists so that Eames's lazy kisses land on the dimpled flesh of his cheek, but makes no move to pull away. There's a lovely, rhythmic caress where every breath presses their chests together. 

"Is this where we are then?" Arthur says softly. "Or do you just have a well-hidden thing for a good piece of engineering?'

Eames doesn't want to think about that. He wants to think about how good the tips of Arthur's fingers feel gently ruffling the hair on the crown of his head. He has a vague plan to con their way into one of Saito's lavishly funded research labs so that Arthur can develop his old prototype into a better, healthier, brilliantly commercial PASIV that will sweep the whole market in the blink of an eye and put them both at the pinnacle of the industry. But that can wait until tomorrow. Right now, Arthur's kissing the corner of his mouth, delicately, like he's not in any hurry to let this morning go either. 

"Mmm," Eames says with his eyes closed, contented. "Here we are."

**

It's edging towards two when Eames comes back from tossing the sheets over the washing line to find Arthur throwing a bag with the last pieces of glass from the smashed car window into the outside bin. The black plastic lid falls with a sound of finality. The satchel with Arthur's laptop is sitting on the bonnet.

When Arthur holds his hand out for the keys, Eames gives them up.

As they pull back onto the road, he's running through all the distractions he can muster on the return trip to delay the moment of pulling up outside the Pointe-Rouge house and relinquishing Arthur to the rival charms of his family.

Arthur's effortless at the wheel, easing the car from one gear to the next, responding to the hum of the motor like they speak a common language. His accelerator foot revving the engine through a sharp uphill corner produces the purr of a machine finally getting the sure handling it craved all along. He's never driven with Arthur outside a dream before.

They come back to the first crossroads all too quickly.

"Right for the highway," Eames advises, keeping his gaze on the daisy-strewn verge beside the road.

"I don't think so."

And that's one hell of a trick. Arthur's as grim and focused as ever, but under it all is humour, so dry as to be almost imperceptible – a teasing note that Eames has never been able to hear before. One mischievous, sidelong glance confirms it. 

"No?"

He wants to hear it again, that secret, invisible invitation. Arthur doesn't let him down.

"If you're abducting me, you could do it with a little more conviction."

He takes a left, and then another, turning them north, towards the backroads that run up into the true peaks of the Alps.

"Well," Eames tells him, aiming hopelessly for nonchalance against the debilitating swell of relief. "I wouldn't want to fall short of your lofty expectations."

The motor stutters on the shift, then eases into top gear.

"No, Mr Eames. I don't imagine that you would."

 

**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I couldn't have got here without the amazing and varied talents of Pingrid, Cal, Incandescent and Doro - thank you so much! And a huge thank-you to everyone whose comments have helped shape the story's little details and given me much needed encouragement through the editing process.

**Author's Note:**

> A million thank yous to Pingrid, Incandescent and Cal for beta work and feedback - which is an act of incalculable generosity on a story of this length! - and to Doro for a proof-reading beta offer I wish I'd had more time to take up. 
> 
> And thanks to everyone who said they were interested when I mentioned that I wanted to write a story where Eames is not the adorable, flirty rogue he's so often cast as on the basis of that one throw-away endearment in the movie. Especially for still being interested two years later when it had spiralled into 70,000+ words!
> 
> Title is bastardised from XTC's "Senses Working Overtime"


End file.
